GC Pro Helps Faith Church Make a Quick Move

The new Faith Church location in Hammond, Indiana, featuring acoustical treatment and other gear sourced through GC Pro. Photo by Ryan Nigh, GC Pro. © 2014

— NW Indiana’s multi-site Faith Church was moving to a new location on a tight deadline, and GC Pro helped the church convert a reverberant rented gym into a highly intelligible worship space —
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA, July 15, 2014 — Faith Church was originally founded in 1963 in South Holland, Illinois, and like many growing churches these days, its expansions have taken the form of additional “satellite” locations instead of ever-larger main church buildings. They moved to Dyer, Indiana, in 2002 and launched their first satellite location in September 2007 in Cedar Lake, Indiana. A second satellite launched in the spring of 2009 in Valparaiso, Indiana, and two years later on Easter 2011, they opened a campus in Hammond, Indiana; in September 2012, Faith Church crossed over the state line to launch its campus in Beecher, Illinois. Most recently, the church changed locations in Hammond, moving from its original rental space there to a larger one at the Hammond Academy of Science and Technology, where they have contracted to use the school’s gymnasium on Sundays for services. “We have six locations now, and while four of them are in buildings that we own, in two of them we have a rental model, which we find works well at a time when construction costs are rising,” explains Bryan Ford, Faith Church’s Technical Operations Manager. “It gives us a lot more flexibility as we grow.”

Like most gyms, the Hammond Academy’s acoustics are highly reverberant, the opposite of the kind of extremely intelligible environment needed for worship services. Faith Church turned to Guitar Center Professional (GC Pro), the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users, for a solution. GC Pro brought in Accutronics LLC, a regional acoustical consultancy and A/V installer, which along with GC Pro Account Manager Ryan Nigh evaluated the location’s acoustical needs. GC Pro then specified, and Accutronics designed the layout for and installed, nearly 100 Auralex ELITE ProPanel and Cloud ProPanel acoustical panels on the 120 X 80-foot gym’s walls and ceiling.

“It worked out perfectly, and the entire process was transparent to the client,” says Mike Love, Owner of Accutronics. “We looked at the building, Ryan drew up a proposal and sent it to Auralex, which sent us back a list of the right product materials and placement patterns to use for this specific project, and we installed them without hassle.”

Of a total of 95 Auralex acoustical panels, Accutronics installed 40 of them on the gym’s ceiling to reduce flutter echoes and the rest on the walls to absorb reflected sound. As a result, the gym’s reverb time dropped from eight seconds to 1.3 seconds. “That’s a huge reduction in reverb time,” says Love. “And that‘s the kind of result you get when you work with an organization like GC Pro. In this case, the client got an accurate assessment of their situation, an expert solution design, exactly the right products to address the problem and expert installation. Only a company like GC Pro can provide that kind of comprehensive service.”

Faith Church’s Bryan Ford could not agree more: “The difference in the sound is enormous — it’s dramatically improved. They were able handle the entire project from start to finish, and they were also able to meet a very tight deadline and get us into our new church on time. When we opened three weeks ago, we got comments on how good the sound was. We have a lot of music, so we needed to control the sound as much as possible. That’s exactly what happened, so we’re glad we picked GC Pro.”

For more information, please visit www.gcpro.com.

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About Guitar Center Professional/Guitar Center
Founded in 2001, Guitar Center Professional is the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users. Its clientele includes recording studios, audio engineers, producers, recording and touring musicians, live sound venues, post production facilities and more. Emphasizing extraordinary individualized service via local account managers, GC Pro offers expert consultation and a comprehensive selection of the world’s finest equipment for music and audio professionals. More information on GC Pro can be found by visiting www.gcpro.com.