Kevin Quek, Facilities Manager of St. Andrew’s Cathedral with the Allen & Heath Qu-32 in the Main Sanctuary of the Church

SINGAPORE – October 2015 – St Andrew’s Cathedral is the Cathedral Church of the Anglican Diocese of Singapore, which was consecrated in 1862 and gazetted as a national monument in 1973. Located within the Central Business District, the Cathedral offers a respite and a calm oasis to the many who worship in it.

Just like many other churches, St Andrew’s Cathedral faces a typical challenge where there are a number of different services that are conducted and each service has its own mixing needs for its various musicians and choirs. Also, short time frames add to the stress of getting the mix ready for the next service.

However with Allen & Heath’s Qu-32 digital mixer, which offers 32 Inputs and 24 Mix Outputs, these can now be problems of the past. It has been designed for seamless intuitive operation with all the controls easily accessible through the 7inch full colour touch screen and a streamlined logical interface. In the Cathedral, the Qu-32 digital mixers are installed in the traditional worship hall at the Main Building and the contemporary worship space at the Extension building.

“The Cathedral has many services running back to back especially on Sundays from as early as 6.30am to 9.30pm. With the previous analog mixer, there were “resettings” that needed to be done especially during service changeovers. This caused some anxiety amongst our volunteers manning the mixer as the time in-between services can be as close as 3-5 minutes. Getting the mixer ready in time for the next service can be challenging. The numerous buttons/ knobs can be a headache especially for new volunteers and there were times when missing that one knob caused some embarrassment,” commented Kevin Quek, Facilties Manager at the Cathedral.

“With the QU 32, we preset the scenes to the service requirements. Now all that they need to do is to recall their scenes and almost instantaneously, everything falls into place, ready to go. One volunteer commented that now they have “so much time” on their hands whilst waiting for the service to commence, which also means there is no more stress. In the start, there were anxieties expressed by our volunteers when they heard that we were going digital. They were worried that they would “mess up” during the services. These fears however proved to be unfounded once they were hands on with the mixer. ” continued Quek.

There is a mixture of young to middle age volunteers and the initial fear was that they would not be able to cope with the digital mixer and that the services on Sundays would be affected. Arrangements for a familiarization course were made and conducted by Simon Wong from E&E. The response was fantastic as close to forty volunteers showed up and a second mixer was prepared so that others would have a chance to explore the mixer.

Since there were still some uncertainties and anxieties that needed to be addressed after that, sessions were arranged for different services, and more training based on their service needs and they were provided with hands on sessions, which were made available for a good 2 weeks before the mixers were finally installed. It helped tremendously as the confidence of the volunteers grew. They met up close with the Qu-32 and were surprised as to how easy it was to use it. It helped that the Qu-32 has a close resemblance to an analogue mixer.