My Church Gig

Christmas Eve services and the weekend after are like the Super Bowl for church services.  It’s the most attended service of the year by fans and visitors alike.  I heard we had close to 6,000 adults and children.  Yikes.  I think we bring our best every weekend but Christmas Eve is an opportunity to reach for even better.  I retuned the house system with EAW Smaart (first time with Smaart) in less than an hour.  Not the smaartest thing to do (pun intended) … you know, a drastic overhaul on the system right before the Super Bowl of church … but the risk paid off.  Big.

The average person probably only noticed a small difference.  Our mixes were already good.  The difference is now most of our channels have very little EQ and when I move faders the mix does exactly what I expect it to do.  The goal with Smaart is getting “linear response” out of the system so that what comes out of the mixing console is exactly what you hear in the room.  There’s still work to do like solving some time alignment and phase issues but just this first step has given me what feels like a brand new system.  

In the last couple weeks I’ve had more of those moments being stunned at the sound during worship: moments where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  That’s a great feeling.  Speaking of the sum of the parts, you don’t get a great mix without a great band so props to last weekend’s band!  BJ, on drums, is a high-school senior who plays like a seasoned session player.  Dude showed up and took down all the cymbals except hats and ride and absolutely rocked it.  Jason lays down one of the most solid bass foundations at Cornerstone with just the right flair.  Greg added great shimmer and rhythm with his Larrivee.  Kevin’s choice of tones and parts are always perfect.  Stephanie and Kim have chemistry like few others.  Their pitch was perfect and their energy contagious.  Scott’s guitar tones are always above the bar – he is a tone freak.  He and Kevin share the same playing sensibility and street smarts.  Scott’s voice and mic technique was great.  With volunteer players like we have at Cornerstone it sounds great even when the sound guys have a rough day.

I’m curious if anyone in the congregation notices the difference.  If so, leave a comment.  I’d love to hear.

After the jump is just geeky stuff about tuning our auditorium with Smaart.

With current “fiscal realities” my request to purchase Smaart (about $1800 in stuff without buying a computer) fell under the “if I could only buy one thing this year” capital purchases category.  I bought the stuff from B&H Photo Video because they discounted the software by $100 and they had the microphone and audio interface EAW recommends on their website.  Keep in mind that if you buy a cheap measurement mic and a cheap audio interface it’s not worth the investment in the software.

Here’s the shopping list all from B&H Photo Video:

1. EAW Smaart v6

You can buy this directly from www.eaw.com but B&H discounts it $100.  It includes 2 licenses for version 6 (our Brentwood campus got one) and 2 licenses for version 5.  I put v5 on my notebook.  Pretty generous even at $700 if you ask me.

2. Earthworks: M23 Measurement Microphone

The least expensive of the Earthworks line.  Still phenomenal specs.

3. Sound Devices: USB Pre

A USB audio interface with super flat response and amazing specs.

4. Computer

We had a computer left over from when we went all Mac in the production booth so I used that.

I still have a lot to learn but here was my initial approach.  I cranked up the pink noise to 87dB A-weighted slow.  That’s our average volume level for worship.  I put the mic left of center in the auditorium as if the room were split in thirds.  Comb filtering is inevitable dead center of any room and I was sure I didn’t want to tune the room compensating for that.  Comb filtering means that frequencies cancel each other out in a way that looks like comb teeth on a spectrum analyzer; sounds like you’re in a plastic tube when it’s really bad.

After tuning the side line arrays I moved the mic dead center and tuned the center horizontal array.  When done with that I cranked up the whole system and moved the mic around.  The floor is pretty even now.

Smaart takes one feed from the console and one from the mic and displays both at once so you can compare the two.  The pink noise coming out of the console is not quite flat so matching things up is slightly different than the usual approach with an RTA.  We have an old DBX DriveRack 480.  There are much better sounding products out nowadays but this is what I’m going to have for a long while.  I used the 31 band EQ to get things close then a few parametric filters to do the fine tuning.  Smaart showed me a gaping hole at 11.5K – a real sizzle of a frequency.  I would never have given the system a 7dB boost at that frequency on my own.  Now during a live performance Smaart shows me that what the mic hears in the room is very, very close to what the console is putting out.  And sizzle it does.

We have an Innovason SY80.  George Edwards from Sound on Stage described the Innovason preamps to me as sounding like “shredding paper.”  I hear it now.  They are super bright and gritty.  I’ll probably bump that 11.5K down a little again.  It’s not a warm sounding console by any stretch but I’m happy with it.  We’re in no position to replace it any time soon so it’s ours to love.

The most noticeable result of this tuning is that Chris (our other engineer) and I don’t mind using microphones we dreaded using since we bought a pair of Shure KSM9.  The Shure Beta 58s and our Sennheiser 865s are back in rotation sometimes in favor of the KSM9s.  It’s not that we absolutely love them again.  Now that we hear how they actually sound, they are predictable and sound perfectly fine.  Beyer mics will be our next purchase.

At the end of the day, mixing is about art, not science.  This science so far has allowed me to achieve some of the best mixes of my life at under 91dB-A.  This is a whole new level of excellence and I’m inspired to learn more about the science I’ve shrugged for so long under the guise of being an artist.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.