Quick view:
- The church deployed two KLANG:vokal+ processors to manage 24 discrete immersive mixes. The platform’s 3D spatial panning allows performers to place instruments and vocals naturally across the soundstage, eliminating clutter and frequency masking compared to conventional stereo IEM setups.
- On-stage musicians and worship leaders make real-time gain and placement adjustments directly from their personal devices, transforming the monitor engineer’s role from active mixing to supervisory gain staging, EQ management, and signal verification.
- Linked to a repurposed DiGiCo SD10 desk over a dedicated MADI connection, the KLANG infrastructure auto-syncs with DiGiCo console snapshots.
Even by Texas standards, First Baptist Church Pasadena is a large church. Some years ago, it expanded its campus with major master-planned facilities that included a 2,500-seat modern worship center, a traditional basilica-style chapel with laminated wood interior and gorgeous stained glass, a prominent western entry bell tower, and a dedicated 10,000-square-foot children’s wing. More recently, it upgraded the audio system for its main worship space, adding two KLANG:vokal+ immersive IEM mixing systems, dedicated to mixing monitors for the church’s contemporary and blended services each Sunday.
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As with most new technologies, FBC Pasadena eased itself in, starting with one KLANG:vokal+ and several KLANG:kontrollers in September 2025. That was just after two new DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles were also acquired, all through Springfield, Missouri-based pro audio dealer Paragon 360 and Paragon Direct. Those consoles are now used for front-of-house and broadcast applications, while one of the church’s original DiGiCo SD10 consoles was moved to create its first dedicated monitor position, with a MADI connection between the desk and the KLANG systems.
For a while, said FBC Pasadena director of media Brent Shore, stage monitors were mixed via a combination of the initial KLANG system and directly through the console, one route for the band and orchestra and the other for the vocalists. “At that point we discovered we loved the KLANG so much and realized it would be so much simpler if we were just using one app and got everybody into the KLANG ecosystem,” he said. “It was working so well for us for the band, so we figured we’d move all of the vocalists over to it as well. Then we could hand out the KLANG:app to those people, and they could start mixing themselves. So in the early part of this year, we added a second KLANG:vokal+, and now we have 24 KLANG mixes, all on the same console.”
This configuration, he continued, has added enormous efficiency to the church’s audio workflow while also vastly enhancing the musicians’ experience on stage. As he explained, the former IEM system had a little bit of volume control, but the tea, couldn’t do a whole lot of panning or much of anything else. “With KLANG’s spatial audio platform, being able to move instruments around has cleaned the band’s mixes up so much. They all said, ‘This is so much clearer than what we were previously using,'” Shore said.
Shore said the logistical benefits of KLANG also extend to the tight changeover between the blended and contemporary services. As he explained, managing two distinct service styles presents significant technical hurdles, especially when facing a tight 15 to 20-minute turnaround between a choir-and-orchestra blended service and a contemporary band-only set. With lighting, video, and stage elements all requiring rapid changes in that narrow window, KLANG’s preset recall capability has transformed the monitor workflow. Rather than manually tracking down settings across multiple interfaces, the team simply loads each service’s session to instantly restore mixes, in-ear settings, and hardware controller assignments. By communicating directly with the console to pull up configurations and repopulate channel names automatically, the system streamlines what was once a complex changeover into a seamless, reliable transition.
"That’s made it so much easier to prep our workflow for two very different services," Shore concluded. "In a very real way, it’s revolutionized the way our monitors work.”
