Subject:Recording Church Services

Posted by: Flybnj

Date:2/19/2003 9:48:35 AM

I am pretty new to the digital recording world, and my church would like to start making cds instead of tapes for their outreach ministry. The tapes have been of a poor quality for quite some time due to improper mixing to the recorder. (for example, the sound guy is either sending too little or way to much of a signal causing no sound or distorted sound)

I have been thinking about putting a computer back there and running the output of one of the aux. of the mixer to the computer and recording the service as a wav file, and then i could use wave hammer or normalize as i needed to, to gt a better recording and then burning to a cd.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I should do this, is this the apropriate approach? What kind of computer or sound card should i use? (Church budget is limited Need to keep cost of comp and software under 1200 if i can)

Our setup is something like this. We usually are useing between 1 and 12 mics at once, we have a 1000Watt amp, a yamama mixing board with 22 channels, we have a feedback Ferret somewhere in the line, and equalizer, and a couple of tape decks and a DVD/CD player. Everything is fed into the mixer then out to teh amp then to the speakers. THe mixer has 5 Aux.; 1 pre, 1 post and 3 that can be either.

Thanks for your help.
FlyBnJ

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: musicvid10

Date:2/19/2003 12:04:40 PM

Just a few thoughts:
You can do it that way, but the first three rules of event recording are backup, backup, backup. Don't get rid of the analog tape equipment.

Replacing the tape deck with a computer isn't going to solve the level problem. Only a trained board op with attention to the details will accomplish this. Clipped inputs sound worse on digital because of the hard ceiling.

There are several digital recorders with built-in CD burners and hard drives in the price range you mention. If all you're going to use it for is audio recording, why not get a dedicated product. Poke around musiciansfriend.com to get an idea of the many options.

There are a number of excellent educational materials that can assist you here: http://www.shure.com/booklets/techpubs.html

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: Chienworks

Date:2/19/2003 1:10:10 PM

This is my sunday morning job. We have a Yamaha 48x8x3 house mixer with the groups (lead vocals, bgvs, guitars, etc.) and several of the direct outs (Pastor's lapel, pulpit mic, piano mic, baptismal mic, etc.) going into a separate Mackie 2404 recording mixer. One tech controls the house mix and i do a sub mix for the recording. We use a generic 800MHz P3 computer with a SoundBlaster Live card, record, edit, and master in SoundForge 6, then burn the CD with Vegas 3. I usually monitor through headphones while recording so that i can hear what the recording will be like without being confused by the room sound. What sounds good to the congregation through the house speakers is often radically different from what sounds good in the recording.

Probably one of the biggest helps i have is a compressor inline between the recording mixer and the computer. I'm using an Alesis 3630, though just about any budget compressor would work. This is used mostly as an auto-gain limiter control and allows me to concentrate on the mix rather than worrying about the overall level. Most of the compression is applied after recording in SoundForge along with noise reduction.

If we were only recording people speaking, then the external compressor alone would probably take care of the job for you. Recording other things such as the praise & worship team, congregational singing, piano solos, and other items requires more attention from a human operator.

You don't need much hardware for this. A separate mixer is very nice, but isn't necessary. Before we had the second mixer, i used one of the aux sends from the house mixer and reached around the other operator to adjust the aux mix as necessary. For the computer, go to Wal*Mart and buy one of their $600 specials; this will be more than enough for audio work. Make sure you uninstall/disable everything that it comes preinstalled with! SoundForge Studio will let you do most of the recording and editing work you'll need. It won't burn DAO multi track CDs, but you can use the included CD burning software (often EZ-CD Creator) for this. I do strongly recommend the external compressor though. You can probably find a mono unit for under $100.

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: robertallen

Date:2/19/2003 3:20:42 PM

Hey Fly,

Using SoundForge is an excellent way to keep them and store them on CD and also to put on the church web site. I do the same exact stuff. I can't guarantee that you'll get a perfect recording but I have to say the only thing I would recommend you recording SoundForge is the 2 hour messages after worship, unless you are really great at recording 12 things down to 2 tracks you won't get the best quality out of the worship team on tape. That would require a lot more money.

Now if you just want to use SoundForge for just recording the message, I'd just purchase SoundForge XP for under 100 bucks, make sure you have a good sound card with a good processor (I use P3) and I would highly recommend getting a hard drive specifically for this...make sure it's 7200RPM.

Also like the other guy said (sorry I forgot your name) backup backup backup. for that just use a tape.

Honestly the only difference in quality is you won't get a lot of tape hiss...but it's great for burning to CD's and also for the web (esp the RealAudio feature)

now if you're wanting to give CD's out to people in the congregation or sell them, you'd need CD Architect. I don't use the new CD Architect I use the old one. The reason is is because you're recording an avg 1hour and a half message onto one WAV file on your PC. CD Architect allows you to put splits for the CD tracks in a certain blank spot. I usually do every 6 minutes or so. If you don't do this then you wind up with a big huge Track 1 and what if someone wants to fast forward to a certain point in the message they missed or want to hear. Everything I mentioned to you will cost you under 500 dollars for all this.

Give me an e-mail at robertallen@usa.com if you have any questions. I've been doing church music/sound production for a big church in MI.

Also if you have a very excited pastor/minister who can get loud at times you'll also want to buy a small compressor/limiter to keep those words from peaking over the 0.0db. eBay for under 100.

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: Hummingbird

Date:2/19/2003 6:15:17 PM

I, too, record every Sunday morning and had to experiment with the best overall levels. No matter what equipment you may use, setting optimum levels is the first AND most significant task. Why spend lots of time correcting unnecessary faults?

I occasionally had to 'scrap' a little with the sound technician, but we worked out a system where I have my own small mixer for recording. I mix to my heart's delight and send him a pre-fader feed. He does his house mix separate from mine.

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but if you weren't getting good tape recordings, it's unlikely you'll get any better CD recordings.

Hummingbird

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: smithbo

Date:2/19/2003 7:52:30 PM

This is my Sunday morning routine as well. You've gotten a lot of good answers, so I'll just bring up a few other points.
(1) The Congegation: One of the pieces of the service sound that is usually missing from the board is the congregation itself, and a tape of the service really sounds empty without it. Consider having a couple of hanging mikes (or whereever you can put them) that are specifically for inserting the congregation sound into the recording aux and are not directed into the sound reinforcement bus (bad feedback).
(2) Mixing: I do my recording from a Roland digital recorder, using 4 inputs off the insert jacks from our 4-bus Mackie 24x4 (plugs pushed halfway in). By using the balance controls and selector switches on the board, I get platform mikes, congregation mikes, singers, and instruments on the 4 busses, respectively. This allows me to adjust the mix in a final stereo mixdown stage. You could do the same thing live by hooking these separate sounds into a small mixer (Mackie 1202, etc) and using headphones to mix into a stereo tape deck.
(3) Caution: If you introduce a computer or other digital device into the area around the sound board, you may feed rf interference into your wireless mike receivers. I learned this the hard way. Test a lot before implementing in a service.

Good luck!! Bob

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: Flybnj

Date:2/20/2003 3:21:32 PM

THanks so much for all the wonderful replies! THere is alot of helpful information there for me to mull over with my sound crew. I most likey will have more questions and will not hesitate to come here with them. THanks again for the wonderful help. It is great to see that so many are using their skills to serve the Savior! If you guys think of anything else i am checking daily. :)

FlyBnJ

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: PixelStuff

Date:2/26/2003 2:42:25 AM

Flybnj,

If you are still reading this thread, how are you feeding audio to your recorder? Which output from the mixer?

JBJones

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: pctech4u

Date:2/28/2003 10:25:36 PM

Like many other I'm the Director of Technology at a large Church in the Nashville TN Sub's we are music nuts (Church memebers won 7 grammy's this year). We go overboard on some things but membership requirements are high. I have most everything and I can answer most any question. I have my crew of 8 along with myself will be working at the DOVE AWARDS so if you want some advice send me a email at matt.ruff@christcommunity.org

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services

Reply by: Flybnj

Date:3/3/2003 3:49:03 PM

Hey,

We are running the feed out of the Aux 4 to the recorders, it is a post aux.

Thanks

Flybnj

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services OT

Reply by: decrink

Date:3/7/2003 1:27:39 AM

What do you mean "membership requirements are high". I'm curious and off topic about that phrase.

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services OT

Reply by: Flybnj

Date:3/11/2003 7:25:55 PM

I think he ment his members expect good sound???

Flybnj

Subject:RE: Recording Church Services OT

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:3/12/2003 5:27:25 PM

"I have most everything and I can answer most any question."

Ok, let's suppose I have 2 church choir singers each with seperate microphones and the mics are spaced about 6 feet apart from each other, each singer is about 1 foot from their respective mic. So the "3 to 1" rule is intacted already. "Singer 1" is a big Baptist preacher with a naturally loud thunderous voice. "Singer 2" is a small petite woman with a very soft voice. Now to match up the levels of the 2 singers voices I have to turn the gain on the mic/pre of the woman's microphone way up. Now everytime "Singer 1" sings it sounds like he's singing into a tin can.
What can you do to fix this problem?

This is actually a very common thing that happens when using multiple mics. I've heard this problem on the Tonight Show a few times with Jay Leno. This is just a little engineering trivia teaser that I believe everyone could use some good information on and since "pctech4u" opened himself up, I'ld like to direct the question towards him, but everyone feel free to jump in and answer.