I know people who work on dead bodies.  I have several friends who, after graduating from college, went on to medical school.  They were given cadavers (dead bodies) which lasted throughout much of their schooling.  They dissected the bodies so they could learn how the body works; where nerve bundles are found and how muscles are connected, among other things.  In time, understanding the parts of the body meant gaining a better understanding of how the body works together as a whole.  read more »

Setting EQ vocals is easy if you know what you're doing.  The good news is much of that work is rather formulaic.  Before I get to the "how" part, let's look at the "why."  It's important to know why you are EQ'ing a singer so you can produce the best result.  read more »

The brain is amazing.  You can tell two instruments apart when they are playing the same melody at the same time.  In fact, your brain takes all the overtones (harmonics) that make up the sound of one instrument playing one note and you just hear one trumpet or one piano sound.  You don't "hear" all the different frequencies in one instrument as your brain uses unconscious inference to group the similar objects together as one.  read more »

The acoustic guitar can produce a range of beautiful sounds.  This article covers how equalization can be used to bring out the tone, clarity, and depth of the acoustic guitar.

We also cover how the equalizer can be used to distinguish one instrument from another when they share a common frequency range such as between the acoustic guitar and a piano.

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Check out the post of Basic Mic'ing Techniques for Piano from ChurchAudio.

I'm finding some worship team pianist's like to play a regular piano instead of an electric such as the Clavinova.  While a baby grand does have a great sound, toss in a guitar, some drums, and a whole congregation singing, then you see why you need to mic the piano.  JB shows in his article that it usually takes more than one microphone.

A common approach to sound mixing is the four step approach; Set fader's at 0 point , set the gain, turn on the channels, and leave the board alone until the end of the service.  Looking at the fader's, they are all in a flat line. This is a good place to start but it's not the final answer.

Mixing the different sounds in a service is much more than that.  Read more to find out how you can bring your sounds to life.

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Mixing a worship team is more than just setting sound levels.  Mixing involves bringing out the particular frequencies in each voice and musicial instrument that, when combined together, present a high quality emotional sound.  A high quality sound means no low hums, no muddy sound, no high tinny sounds, and to better think of it, listen to a well eq'd classical music cd.  In classical music, there are so many unique instruments each with their own ranges and uniqueness.

Here is a simple 13-stage process to mixing;

Stage 1:  read more »

Could you EQ properly if your life depended on it?  I'm not talking perfect EQ'ing for CD quality recordings, I'm talking standard vocal and instrument EQ'ing that puts those sounds in the right ranges for a pleasant listening experience.  read more »

This sound engineer covers a lot of material regarding types of microphones, microphone placement, eq, etc.   read more »

Here is something you can try at your next service for monitor mixing...I've just read about this so take it for what it's worth...it's from a worship teams old blog. Everything seems theoretically sound...and it seems easy. 

1. Have one person liasing the sound from the Stage with the Sound guy from the Desk

2. Line Check Instruments in this order : Vocals, then Instruments and then drums last  read more »