Introduction
After having spent my entire life in the Church, and much of my adult life either as a volunteer or on staff as part of a church audio team, I found that there was an overall lack of information for average person. While there are a handful of books that offer insight into certain aspects of engineering that I found to be very helpful, such as: The Ultimate Church Sound Operators Handbook by Bill Gibson, there are many things that are completely left out. These books are often geared towards engineers, not the “lay” person. With 80% of churches having 75 people or less and 90% having 300 people or less, with only 1% of churches having over 1000 people in attendance per week , this means that roughly 80% to 90% of churches audio production needs are likely executed by volunteers. If not volunteers, they are often executed by relatives of the pastor, or the youth pastor (who can oftentimes be a relative of the head pastor).
I hope this website provides the information necessary to enable the lay person, be that a relative or a volunteer, to understand the basic concepts for audio production they will need to know. I would also like to educate them as to what I have learned works in a live setup, what equipment is available to them, how to operate it, and to better help them to execute their weekly production needs and bring their level of excellence to their desired standard.
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What Is On This Website
As I stated in my opening, even after operating audio at my local church in Nevada and pursuing audio production in my undergraduate schooling, there were many basic things that I didn’t know. For example, even though I had mixed live audio for two years and completed the music industry minor at the University of Nevada, Reno, when I first started volunteering at Cherry Hills Community Church (CHCC), I did not know the difference between a dynamic microphone and a condenser microphone. One day at CHCC I was asked to grab a condenser microphone to help test something, and I grabbed the most dynamic microphone you possible could grab, an SM58. In this website, it is my hope to offer insight from lessons I have had to learn over the last 11 years, and give you practical tools and guides to help serve and execute your weekend audio production needs.
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I will talk about microphones (dynamic vs condenser), what their uses are, and offer some basic suggestions for microphones that people use all over the world. I will also discuss polar pickup patterns of microphones, Direct Injection Boxes (DI’s), all the fancy knobs and switches on them, discuss which DI’s I’ve seen utilized in churches and church camps that I’ve worked in, and talk about which ones are better and why. I will talk about basics of signal flow (the path an acoustic or electrical signal takes from source to output), take you through the “channel strip” (part of the mixing console), discuss how to get a more consistent mix from week to week (gain structuring and others), feedback and how to avoid it, tips for building a good front of house and broadcast mix, monitor engineering and different ways to make it better, and then finally the different programs utilized for playback tracks/multitracks and how to use them.