Let’s take a short trip in the not-so-wayback machine — back to Spring of 2020. Remember that wonderful time? Let me refresh your memory. Everything was shut down. Like, the whole world. We were all cooking along, providing high-quality audio to our congregations sitting in the sanctuary, when out of the blue we were suddenly upended by a global pandemic. We were all told that folks would be attending church online for a little while. Some of us were well-prepared for this reality because we were already streaming live services online or at least making pre-recorded services available.
The Bare Necessities
But some of us were not quite as well-prepared, having never even considered how to provide our services online. Indeed, for many, it was suddenly sink-or-swim. Among those who were only just starting into online services, some pounced with fervor, expending substantial time, money, and effort into the technology and process of getting a service online each week. And others kept it very rudimentary, leveraging smartphones, tablet devices and/or webcams to get the job done. Most improved on those humble beginnings when it became plausible to do so, but some kept on chugging along with the pastor’s wife’s cell phone providing the weekly live stream.
Certainly, the majority who invested more than just the bare minimum are continuing to stream services, but a few have stopped live streaming altogether, now that it’s plausible for people to gather in the house of worship once again. My impression is that some churches have decided to eliminate streaming by way of compelling parishioners to show up in person. I get that — but I’m inclined to think that the livestream is a nice option for those who simply cannot physically get to church, and streaming is not going to go away now.
Now two years later, we have some experience with live streaming and we can speak from that experience and use it to inform our process and workflow going forward. Let’s dig into this topic and sort out some best practices for live streaming. Of course our discussion will be limited to the audio part of the equation. We love our video and graphics brethren and sistren, and we’ll let them handle the visual part of the equation. We’re the experts in audio, and we will stick to that part of it.
The Three Layers
The way I see it, there are essentially three major levels of sophistication when it comes to providing audio for a church service live stream. First, the very simple mechanism of taking a main bus output from the church front of house mixer and feeding it along with the streaming video. Anything short of this is simply not going to provide audio of reasonable quality. And when I say “anything short of this,” I’m referring to something that many small churches did when the quarantine first started: they literally just grabbed a smartphone or tablet device, pointed it toward the platform, and streamed whatever the tablet’s camera and microphone could gather. Not a great solution. Perhaps fine for a week or two while we’re trying to gather the technology and general wherewithal to advance our offering to the next level. But it’s just not that hard to put together the necessary adapters to deliver a headphone or two-track recording output from our FOH mixer to the stream, even if it’s being captured by a smartphone or tablet. And in my opinion, that’s the bare minimum.
So what’s the next level above bare minimum? So glad you asked. Most churches with more than 100 parishioners are probably going to have a moderately well appointed digital mixer at front of house. Of course there’s the odd exception, but even so, the old 24x8x2 analog mixer with a ton of dust bunnies lurking under it may still have what we need. And what we need is an available auxiliary bus. One is probably being used as a reverb send, and maybe one is being used as a delay send. And certainly one or two or four are likely to be in service feeding monitors, either IEM or floor wedges. But if we can spare just one auxiliary bus, we can sort of provide a discrete mix for our live stream. And I stress the phrase “sort of” because this is still not an optimal solution, although it is still preferable to just piping the mixer’s headphone output to the livestream.
There are two major reasons why that is less than awesome. First, front of house engineers are already busy with the mix we’ve assigned them to handle — front of house. Yes… they’re occasionally asked to also mix a few buses worth of monitors, but that can be a largely set-and-forget prospect. Asking them to mix monitors, front-of-house, and a live stream is asking a lot — even for seasoned professionals. Now imagine a green volunteer trying to navigate these turbulent waters. Safe bet that a few spinning plates are going to hit the floor. The second reason is that auxiliaries simply do not give us an opportunity to properly mix. For all practical intents and purposes, we only have access to the blend between all the elements of the mix; instruments, voices, and so on. We cannot dial up EQ settings or dynamics processing that make sense specifically for the livestream. Presumably, the auxiliary bus will be configured post fader, which means we’ll be just sending along whatever EQ and dynamics have been applied to our main signal path.
But It Sounds Good Over Here…
But doesn’t a nicely compressed and equalized snare drum sound better than one with no processing at all? Well, yes and no. The front of house mixer is just that — a mixer intended to create a mix for the sanctuary. And the processing we apply and the blend we achieve works well and sounds great… in the sanctuary. The sound in the sanctuary is a combination of two things: the sound that comes from the P.A., the unamplified acoustical energy from the platform — drums, voices, acoustical guitars and other acoustical instruments, and the output of onstage guitar and bass cabinets… stuff that can be heard without the benefit of being piped through the P.A. As mixers, we blend those two elements in a way that makes it sound good.
By comparison, the drums will not be represented as loudly in the P.A. as a synthesizer, because the congregation will hear some drum SPL directly — despite our best efforts to contain that SPL with Plexiglas cages and the like. The result is that the stereo bus mix does not present the drums loudly enough to sound correct outside the context of the sanctuary. We can compensate for this a bit with an auxiliary mix by punching the drums up a bit, and that’s a better solution than just feeding the headphone output of the FOH mixer, but it’s still a half-measure. And it leads us to the best solution there is.
The preferred way to provide high quality audio to your livestream is to send a split from the platform (done reasonably easily in the age of digital audio) directly to a secondary, dedicated livestream mixer, and have someone mix the service exclusively for the stream. This is certainly the most sophisticated of the three methods, and certainly costs more than the other two, but it provides the highest quality audio for the stream. One issue worthy of consideration: finding a room somewhere in the church facility to set up the livestream mixing suite. It should be as acoustically isolated from the sanctuary as possible, and it should be as acoustically proper as the budget will allow. Bass traps, mid-to-high frequency absorption, and perhaps diffusion can be accomplished for a reasonable price, and I definitely recommend it. Good monitors are a plus, although there’s also some logic in using inexpensive monitors to approximate the home entertainment center quality through which most will hear your mix. Many churches are using DAWs to handle this mix, but it’s also plausible to repurpose that mixer in storage that became obsolete when you installed a more sophisticated desk last year at front of house.
While it’s comforting to know that these three degrees of sophistication provide a way for virtually any church to get a stream online, I still urge folks to pursue the best possible solution and strive for a discrete mix. When your stream is live online, the whole world can see it, so you’ll want to put your best foot forward.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
