Many of today’s churches are struggling with how to best utilize technology, and are wrestling with how to best deliver their message via broadcast or Internet streaming. My church is going through many of these technological growing pains right now. Sure, we have digital consoles, a line array and LED lighting, but we have yet to make the leap into multi-camera video streaming of full services. Most of our discussions about delivering content online have centered on the video production aspects, such as cameras, switchers, graphics and recording.
Anytime I get involved in such discussions, I always emphasize the importance of quality audio for video. In fact, I see audio (and lighting for that matter) as a major prerequisite to quality video production. If the audio isn’t good, people simply will not watch. They might be a bit more forgiving of the lighting, but they will not compromise on the audio. I know this to be true from worship in a live environment, where members of our congregation often have comments about the audio mix, but I rarely get any comments about the lighting. It is incumbent upon us as church technical staff to ensure a good quality audio mix for broadcast while not breaking the bank, and there are a number of ways to achieve this.
The Left/Right Mix
The most basic and common way to generate a broadcast mix is supply a copy the left/right FOH mix using a matrix. I’m rarely happy with such mixes, although a lot of this depends on the size of your room. In smaller rooms, your left/right house mix is going to translate poorly to broadcast because of the contribution of ambient sound to your mix. As the room size increases, the ambient sound of the instrumentation becomes less of a factor, and the left/right mix will translate better to broadcast. Regardless of room size, a discerning listener will never be happy with just a left/right FOH board mix. One improvement you can make is to add a pair of ambient microphones in the house and sum them into your left/right mix. This can add some space and ambience to your mix, assuming the mics are properly time-aligned with your direct feed. Different stereo mic techniques such as XY, NOS and ORTF can yield vastly differing results, as can the placement of the mics in the room. Experiment with different stereo techniques, placement and the level balance between your board feed and the mics to achieve optimal results.
Stereo Aux
One typical technique for gaining back some control of your broadcast feed is to use a stereo aux to generate a submix, independent of the left/right mix. This approach definitely has its merits, as it will allow you to get a better balance between instruments and vocals than your left/right mix alone. It also requires time and attention that your FOH engineer may or may not have, and even if they do, you may not be 100 percent happy with the results. One of the problems I’ve come up against when using auxes is that I lose any sort of subgroup processing that I have on my drums or vocals. If you’re like me, you might have some EQ and compression on a drum or vocal subgroup. When dialing input channels straight to aux sends, that group processing is lost. Of course, the problem with using auxes is that you are still generating that mix from inside of your worship venue, so the sound of the P.A. is going to have an impact on the decisions you make.
Stems
Moving beyond the FOH console, another possibility is to send stems to a small mixer located remotely. This has the advantage of being located outside of the worship space, so it’s isolated from the main P.A. Any number of stereo subgroups can be sent to a separate small mixer, but for a typical worship band this might include drums, bass, guitars, keys and vocals. Assuming your FOH console has the physical outputs, and you can pull lines into another nearby room, this approach can work, and has the potential to be better than the aux send method. If the stem mixing console is a small digital mixer, you can even add some processing and finishing to your mix as you blend the stems together.
Fresh Possibilities
With virtually every manufacturer offering some sort of remote control over their consoles via laptops or iPads, there are some interesting new possibilities for broadcast mixing on a budget. I can envision using an iPad to generate a broadcast mix in a separate room, with a pair of local monitors fed off of the FOH console. The mix will likely be driven from an aux as described above, but at least now you are in a separate room, isolated from the main P.A. Yet another possibility would be to use a personal monitor mixing controller (see the Buyers Guide on page 44 for some suggestions) to generate a basic broadcast mix from individual channels or stems.
The ideal approach to mixing broadcast is a dedicated mic split (either analog or digital) and a separate console. For most of us, having a separate broadcast console is not an immediate reality, but something to aspire to in the future. In the meantime, there are numerous other approaches to creating a quality broadcast mix for online worshippers. Take time to experiment with different methods to find out what works best for your church.
