My Church Gig

Donnie Darko is one of my top ten favorite movies of all time.  In a very memorable scene a teacher asks students to read a paragraph describing a potentially complex moral dilemma (something like someone found a wallet with money in it but kept the dough then turned the wallet in to lost and found) then asks them to place an X on the life line between fear and love.  Donnie argues that life isn’t that simple; you can’t evaluate every life situation on a one-dimensional line.  Then he gets sent to the principles office for… well, you’ll have to rent the movie.

So it is with intensity in music.  You can’t just place an X on the volume line between quiet and loud.  It’s not that simple.

I say this all the time: Greater volume does not necessarily equal greater intensity.

The inverse is as true:  Less volume does not necessarily equal less intensity.

Intensity is borne more out of complex concepts like motion, tone, balance and tension than by the one-dimensional concept of volume level.  There’s a certain level of maturity a musician gains the moment he or she realizes that song sections don’t necessarily need to be louder or softer – they just need to vary in intensity.  Here’s why this is important to me.  Every time I’m behind the console and I hear a band just play softer, not only does the detail of their parts vanish, they typically get sloppy.  I know because I bring up the faders to get them back in the game only to discover the game’s been momentarily suspended.

I say this as a bass player to other bass players and the drummers to whom we are married to for moments at a time:  Play what you mean.  Mean what you play.  Always. “Like apples of gold in settings of silver is a well placed, well chosen note.” –Proverbs 25:11 for musicians.  It applies to all musicians, but especially the rhythm section.  Don’t succumb to the path of fear!

That doesn’t mean you need to be always aggressive.  It means don’t futz around playing ambiguously as if it adds anything to a tender moment and as if few people will hear what you’re playing anyway.  It’s usually just a tender cacophony of background noise.  Instead, play well chosen and well placed notes, like apples of gold in silver settings.

Well, I have the perfect audio clip as an example for you.  We have several great drummers but I’m going to brag on James who played last weekend.  He has every bit of this maturity in understanding intensity.  He drops in the perfect snare hit every time.  He chooses every note and places them well.

Here’s a section of “Jesus Lord of Heaven” which was an awesome moment of worship at our 11:00 service last Sunday.  During this 2nd verse, chorus and bridge the congregation went from standing to hands raised to singing loudly in gratitude to God. It was a moving experience.

As you listen note that the volume level is pretty much the same throughout.  The snare on two and four is the same throughout.  Things that add to the increase in intensity include the organ going from a sweet transparent tone to a rock tone and moving up only one or two inversions; not way crazy up the keyboard.  Also, the electric guitar goes from sparse slides with echoes to eighth note arpeggios adding more and more motion.  All in all every note by every player was intentional.  All of this allowed the vocals to breathe and go where they wanted to go.  If you notice anything else please leave a comment.

Disclaimer: this is a straight board mix with no post-production except for the normalization that Garage Band put on it when I exported the clip.

Jesus Lord of Heaven (example mp3)

Tim Corder is lead audio engineer at Kensington Community Church in Troy, Michigan.  His blog is at the top of my RSS reader and I always get something out of it.  I’m posting a link to his most recent article (as of today) which is a link and a re-post of another article.  This is a MUST READ for anyone in a creative role of any kind.

I don’t obsess over the perfect tones for each individual mix element.  That bothers me some times.  I’m not really an audiophile.  Most people I work with assume I have a killer stereo at home and that I am always in pursuit of perfect sound.  I mean, that’s what you sound guys do, right?  They ask me for advice on what stereo or surround sound system to buy.  I have no idea.  I listen to music on my iPhone or iPod through the standard ear buds.  Sometimes I’ll pump it through some really old, crappy computer speakers with a boxy sounding sub.  I don’t love music for the way it sounds as much as I do for the way it makes me feel.

This translates over into the way I mix as well.  I leave a few rough edges on things and let stuff roll.  I’ll let the guitars bite a little and let the bass wash around down low a touch.  It’s possible to polish the living soul out of anything; anything at all.

Balance is a language and in the creative world it’s about what you say with your sense of balance.  Every so often you witness a balance that moves you; a balance you wouldn’t have thought of and it inspires you.  Every art form from web design, graphic arts, web usability, painting, song arranging, mixing… is about balance, not perfection.

Here’s the link:

What Is Greatness

You’d think that personal mixers and in-ear monitors would effectively eliminate your vocal feedback woes. Ironically no. Not always.

This is one major drawback to in-ears that I had completely forgotten about till last weekend. Working with our guest artist, the imitable Sara Groves, I was reminded of it. Now, Sara did great on Sunday, but I’m going to tell on her a little. I doubt she’d mind.

Saturday night we did a late sound check so they wouldn’t have to in the morning. During a song she stopped and said, “hey, I think I hear a little ringing in my mic.” On the talkback mic, “yeah, I’m sorry Sara. I’m having trouble getting your voice loud enough so I’m riding the edge till I find where my limit is.” “Oh, I can sing louder and eat the mic; I just get lazy sometimes.” Well, I wouldn’t say lazy. Jet lag and a long couple of days at a church conference left her and her band a little exhausted. On Sunday morning she sounded phenomenal.

Years ago I toured as FOH engineer with another singer/songwriter and a full band for one of the most challenging audio experiences of my life. Oh, and one of the best sounding consoles I’ve ever touched; an Amek Recall. He and his band were all on in-ears and he was a whisperer, even in powerful sections of songs. When tuning a room for a show I’d have to make sure I had enough headroom by throwing the main fader full up, and work the feedback out of his channel till it that fader was full up and still get it to reasonably sound musical. At a Nashville show, with the vocal and main faders full up, an industry type came up to the console and shouted, “I need more vocal!” Me shouting, “Who are you?” “I need more vocal!!!” “I said, who are you?!” I was just trying to make sure I wasn’t about to tell the artist’s publisher to [bug off]. Those were younger days.

Here’s the rub. With in-ears you can turn your voice up in your head till you sound great to yourself at any intensity, from a whisper to full out rock and roll. In the studio it works fine. In a live room you’re competing with the dynamics of natural physics. You can only turn up a mic so much till it rings in the mains. If you’d like your words to sound like, well… words, then you really can’t sing as softly as you’d often like.

If you sing with in-ears here’s a tip:

This is counter-intuitive so read carefully. When a mic rings with feedback the normal reaction is to back off. Don’t do it! It’s backwards. What your FOH engineer needs at that moment is a reason to turn your fader down, not up. Get on that mic and sing up so he or she has to turn you down. Otherwise you put them in a lose-lose situation: leave you where nobody can hear you or risk feedback by turning you up to see if they can get you back in the game.

One more thought about critical listening skills as a vocalist:

I’ve notice over the years that good vocalists care deeply about what their voice sounds like but great vocalists care as much or more about what their mic sounds like. In fact, they’ll comment on the microphone before their voice. They’re aware that, no matter what comes out of their mouth, everyone hears only what comes out of the mic.  Their aim is to make the mic sing, and in-ear monitors help them do that better.

Scott Dente was here last week accompanying our men’s conference speaker, Nate Larkin.  Scott was kind enough to play with the worship band for the sessions.

You might remember Scott from Out of the Grey.  God knows I do.  Back in the day I sat plenty with acoustic guitar in hand learning his riffs note for note.  He’s a well-respected musician in the Nashville scene and he’s earned it for his playing ability (think Phil Keaggy) and his integrity.

Chris, my other staff engineer, mixed the conference.  After the conference Scott told us he came into the building late for morning practice and thought to himself, “I’m not late, they’re just playing a CD,” as he heard it from the courtyard.  He was surprised to see the band playing.  He said, “you guys really have this system dialed in … it sounds great … and I’ve been to a LOT of churches …”  

I am bragging on Chris and his skill as an engineer.  (Some other time I’ll talk about how invaluable it is to work with someone you respect and to hone your mixing skills off each other.)  But, it’s not the first time we’ve gotten a compliment from an industry type.  Marcus and Colby from AV Interiors (church AVL consulting) once told me we had the best church sound they’ve heard.

Chris and I are decent engineers; not the industry’s best but still pretty good.  What I attribute our “great sound” (in Dente’s own words) to is the style and direction we’ve chosen to go in.  We intentionally mix as if for tape rather than a standard old-school live mix.  In other words we try to achieve the sound of a produced worship CD.  This doesn’t always meet with the approval of other engineers.  I’ve had plenty of (sometimes constructive) criticism from other engineers and musicians with opinions.  They’re usually right on their end of the philosophy spectrum.

There seem to be two camps for live and recorded sound.  The old school camp values big full vocals, lots of dynamic range, and everything that goes along with it; drums without a shield, amps on stage, and loud stage wedges. Modern digital consoles with internal processing (often exactly the same processing used in the studio) it’s now possible to achieve a studio sound in a live situation; that is if you can achieve a fair amount of isolation on stage.  Engineers in both camps achieve stunning results so it’s not a matter of one being right and the other wrong – or better, or worse.

Here’s why I consider the studio sound approach to mixing to be the best option for church.

1. We’re mixing modern pop-rock.  Two words.  Chris.  Tomlin.  It’s polished, inoffensive, palatable, tasteful, and fairly benign as far as rock goes.  That’s what the people love.
    
2. A Foo Fighters (or even a Tomlin) song sounds intense at any volume in your car.  That’s one of the goals of the mastering process.  Studio engineers use multiband compression and peak limiting to achieve the same intensity, and pretty much the same volume, across the board.  What sounds louder usually isn’t actually louder.  It’s all smoke and mirrors.
     
3. We’re mixing with a volume cap for what the congregation will handle.  In our case that’s 91dBA-slow and we average 88dBA-slow.  That’s not enough to achieve the same intensity you can get with wider dynamics peaking at 98dBA – concert levels.  And that’s the point.  Concert style simply does not work for most of our congregation.

If you spent as much time as I have behind the console for worship, watching the congregation and seeing the effects of your mix on their reaction, you’d know how important the intensity of the music is to a worship experience.  We humans respond deeply to music based on its intensity.  Remember, our response to sound is not necessarily separate from a spiritual experience.  They are as interwoven as our own spirit and skin.

My advice to any engineer is this: pick your style and go all the way with it.  Accept nothing half-baked.  If an old-school live mix is your gig, then do it the best you can.  If you’re in a situation where you can’t isolate amps and drums then you pretty much have to.  At the end of the day the congregation are whom you serve.  If the volume is an interruption to their worship experience then maybe it’s time to switch gears.  

Works for us.

It was still my birthday a couple hours ago.  This post has nothing to do with my church gig or audio in general.  Just wanted to share some thoughts as I’ve reflected on my life today.

For whatever reason, the Lost Dogs’ song Breathe Deep the Breath of God has been the underlying movie theme for the motion of the day.

I believe the same thing that offers me a knack for running sound also contributes to what often feels like an oblique perspective on the Christian life:  a personal sense of the connectedness and balance of things.  For me, forty-some-odd years of life has been every inch a bittersweet symphony with soothing melodies against beds of dissonance as well as disturbing motifs juxtaposed to elegant, shimmering glissandos.  I see the whole thing as beautifully and tragically inseparable.

I’m drawn to shows like Six Feet Under in which completely believable characters face turmoil so magnified that we can’t help but see traces of it within ourselves.  I love movies like Magnolia where troubled characters find ironic redemption in a moment of random, unexpected natural phenomenon.  The world is not as you would reason it to be if you were the inventor.  Strange things actually happen – even raining frogs.

I don’t buy the asceticism veiled as good Christian living that’s been peddled to my generation, era, and culture.  Neither do I buy the Gnosticism veiled as righteous efforts to become more spiritually connected to God as if it were an elevated state one must work to maintain.  These attempts to separate a spiritual world of righteousness from a physical world of sin and suffering are as empty as trite childhood songs; one-dimensional melodies manufactured to make us smile and nothing more.  For me, the spiritual and physical worlds are inseparable.  Keep in mind, friend, that when Christ rose from the dead, he did so in his body, no matter how transformed it was.  The scars in his resurrected hands testify to this connectedness – the spirit of Christ now infused with the stuff of this earth working a powerful redemption ever since.

Most of us spend our lives as slaves to a primal urge for safety and comfort, and it poisons our perception of our relationship with and to God.  In fact, we generally envision heaven as the fulfillment of our desires with ideas of mansions and eternal rest.  When we actually achieve safety and comfort on this planet we drown in our entitlement issues and grow tragically weak.  It’s not what one expects; we were meant for adversity, suffering and death every bit as much as we were meant for love, peace and joy.  It’s part of the deal in this thin layer of air between earth and space.

Few people with social skills talk openly about the 3:00AM staring sessions in pitch black and the thoughts that keep them awake.  The unspoken understanding that each of us carry a burden or two is part of maturity.  Trusted confidants are a gift from God.  As Solomon points out, life is mostly full of empty meaning, and it’s even emptier to whine about all that emptiness.  Just get on with it and contribute your piece of the human progression through history.  That’s his final advice.  Rightly so.  Hope that is seen is no hope at all, Paul says.  So we live hoping, never fully seeing.  We live in the absence of fulfillment until death kindly bridges the gap.

Today, for some odd reason, I remember an uneducated, homeless man in Chicago whom I shrugged off.  Turned out he knew more about the Bible than I did.  You find traces of God hidden in unexpected places.  He does that on purpose by the way, using the weak things of the earth (not necessarily weak in heaven’s eye) to confound the earthly wise.  

I also think of people I know who don’t consider Jesus at all, yet in their recovery from addictions they have more spiritual maturity and a deeper connection with God than most Christians I know.  God specifically answers their prayers too.

This spirit of Christ now infused into the soil and air we live on and in is truly powerful, bringing redemption, belonging, freedom, and strength in ways you wouldn’t expect.  But the end goal is not our safety and comfort; it is our nearness to God.  We get some of it now and all the rest later.  In the meantime we would do well to search for God in the unlikely and unexpected.

So here’s to the mundane, the base, and the beautiful for being so:

politicians, morticians, philistines homophobes
skinheads, dead heads, tax evaders, street kids
alcoholics, workaholics, wise guys, dim wits
blue collars, white collars, war mongers, peace nicks

Breathe deep -
breathe deep the breath of God…

-The Lost Dogs

Engage is our quarterly night of worship. It’s happening this Sunday evening. It’s Palm Sunday by the way. With Good Friday and Easter around the corner that makes these two weeks the busiest of the year for us.

I’m writing this while fine tuning a few things on the Innovason mixing console before the band gets here for rehearsal tonight. Here are some points of interest for this event.

Sound

We’re taking the breaks off the system a little bit, like we’ve done in the past for Engage worship events. We don’t run it as loud as Tomlin or Brewster when they were here. We run between a church service and a concert with no complaints because people are coming for a music event. Sundays are different. I think many Sunday church goers actually just don’t like music but that’s another topic. If it starts to get too edgy for our guests then I can lower the threshold on the system’s overall multiband compressor (TC Electronic Finalizer) to soften things a little (as much as I hate to) while maintaining the punch we want.

Expect to feel a little more subs and more saturated drums. This time we’re using some upward compression on the drums and on the background vocalists.

There are many elements to mix. Most songs will include: 1 lead voc, 2 background vocals, 2 electric guitars, 2 of 3 keyboards at once, 2 acoustic guitars, and Rocky’s DW drum kit with my beloved 24″ kick. With this many elements you have to pick instruments to feature at appropriate times in each song and let the rest blend like oil paints underneath.

I was a little skeptical about two acoustic guitars in every song but panning them left and right is just the right spice for many songs. In any mix your ear is looking for a little sugar, like a shaker, tambourine, or other percussion. It’s a counterintuitive concept for most but strummed acoustic guitars are actually percussive instruments more than melodic. With Derek and Justin playing off each other in syncopation, it’s just the right shimmer.

For best sound you’ll want to sit 8 to 12 rows back in the middle. If you hate subs… well, you’ll have to come to church Sunday morning when we dial it back. :-)~

Lighting Director

A seasoned lighting designer/operator is the one artist we don’t have on staff or in our volunteer lineup. We have several people willing to learn though. For Engage we hired an LD from down south – one of Greg’s contacts. I’m really looking forward to this artistic visual element incorporated to a greater degree in our worship experience.

Stage Design

We have a new look with some cool banners thanks to our media department. We’re also sporting a few new cyc lights for an even wash. This has always been difficult for us using our Nexera washes. When you look at the auditorium and the stage for the first time you’d think that we had all kinds of cool stuff but, remember, when we built the building funds were tight. We only spent $1 mil on the auditorium technology. That sounds like a lot of money. For what we’re doing, it’s not. We had to cut many corners. Lighting got cut the most.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back at some point for a recap.

 I’m mourning the end of Battlestar Galactica.  We used to hang out Friday nights so tonight feels especially empty.

So who’s the guy in the tub?  That’s Anders in a scene that was especially meaningful to me.  For the monologue, not the tub.  Anders has a flashback to an interview when he was a sports star.  Lady asks if he’d consider his career incomplete if his team never won a championship.  Dude replies in stunning clarity why he’s not in it for the win.

Here’s a clip.

Some of the script loosely transcribed:

Look, you wanna know the truth?  I don’t really care about the stats or the cup or the trophy or anything like that … in fact the game’s not that important to me, not really.  What matters to me is the perfect throw, okay? Making the perfect catch, the perfect step and block.  It’s perfection. That’s what it’s about.  It’s about those moments when you can feel the perfection of creation, the beauty of physics, the wonder of mathematics, you know?  The, the elation of action and reaction, and that is the kind of perfection that I want to be connected to.

Do you feel this way about anything you do?  I feel it in just about everything I get involved in.  I notice that most people don’t.  That doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else; just differently gifted.  A lot of my friends share the same sentiment and passion in their jobs and artistic endeavors.

There is a certain perfection, beauty, and wonder that can be found in anything we do; sports, visual art, music, programming, design… mixing worship.  People might see your passion, mistake it for perfectionism then get confused when you don’t nit-pick the details.  What you’re looking for are moments of elation; addictive moments when you feel connected to something deeper, greater, and invisible that has nothing and everything to do with you’re doing all at the same time.  I crave those moments of Godly Zen when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

There have been many moments at Cornerstone when the chemistry on stage was perfect, the faders seemed to have moved themselves under my fingers, and the payoff of a chorus or bridge sounded so good I wanted to pee my pants.  Even more stunning are those same kinds of moments when the congregation sings out, the music and voices blend in the air, you swear you hear angels in the overtones, and you feel the presence of God himself.  That’s usually when I want to crap my pants.

Really spiritual types love to point out that those moments have nothing to do with the band, the worship leader, the sound system, the mix… because they are spiritual and transcendent.  On one hand you’re right to think so.  On the other hand you’re really, really wrong too.  The worship leader, the guitar player, the guy behind the console, the visuals on the screens – they can all absolutely ruin those moments or prevent them from ever happening.  If you’re using any sort of technology for worship it [darned] well does have something to do with the spiritual quality of the worship experience no matter how transcendent some moments are.

If you hang around a Cornerstone Thursday evening rehearsal you might think we’re all obsessed with perfection.  Band members practice songs for hours before rehearsals, rehearsals can even get nit-picky, and we spend the whole time dialing in the mix even to the point of asking players to change tones in sections.  After all that we remind everyone what kind of clothes work for video and what doesn’t.  And that’s just the band!  I won’t go into how hard the camera crew trains on Thursdays.  It’s ridiculous.  A fly on the wall might even consider our rehearsals to lack any real spiritual value.  Well, especially when said wall is pulsating with 105dB of 35Hz subsonic love.  Come on a Sunday and you’ll see the spiritual rewards of mundane, hard work.

With all of that said, I love the chemistry I have with the people I work with.  I often get to feel moments like Anders described.

The challenge I’m gonna put out there is this:  what habits, personal preferences, notions, style… what, if anything at all, do you have that prevents synergistic moments of worship happen in your situation?  Remember, great moments of worship want to happen.  If they’re not happening then something is preventing it.  It’s not about what you can add, like a bigger sound system; it’s about what obstacles you can remove.  Be brave enough to ask a brave friend what they think.  If you can think of anything like say, “my guitar tone is so frign awesome, I point my AC60 at the congregation so the sound guy can’t mess it up,” then cut it out.  Get with the Godly Zen and contribute to something greater than yourself.

Here’s a can of worms: volunteerism vs. quality. They are not always opposites but let’s be honest, if a church hires someone like a graphic artist it’s because they’re ready to pay for consistent quality not possible with volunteers.

I was hired seven years ago when our then portable church was cresting at 1600 attendees across 3 Sunday morning services. I believe that’s the critical mass at which volunteer dynamics change dramatically. The perceived need for quality in all areas grows because of your greater visibility in the community. You’re able to hire for positions you couldn’t afford when you were half the size. It’s also a phase of ecclesiastical puberty in which you look to larger churches for direction. You try on different personalities like Peter in the Brady Bunch episode, “The Personality Kid.” (Porkchopsh and appleshaushe…) God knows we’ve tried on a little Saddleback, a little Willow, and a little North Point in finding our own groove. It’s natural.

Cornerstone had just rolled out a new website with a custom content management system to make it easy for volunteers to update. It became clear that with a public website, our greater visibility required more in terms of quality and accountability than a volunteer team could provide. I was hired primarily as the webmaster and that allowed me to wear the audio engineer hat as well.

I offer this bit of personal history to preface this: I was not prepared for the bait-and-switch my new job handed me. The bait was being hired to do things I love to do (and do well) like mix a Sunday service. The switch was the responsibility for leadership, training and development of volunteer teams. I felt like a drive-by victim of the Peter Principle, promoted to the level of my incompetence. I failed miserably at team building in the early years and it’s still my weakest suit. The thing is with techs and artists, it’s hard to find a good leader and a good doer under the same batch of skin.

Nowadays, church staff members around the country are being laid off in droves and if you keep up with church-related blogs you’re in touch with the panicked rush back toward volunteerism. I got an email from a tech director at a church in Danville asking how we “do volunteers.” Just this morning at a geeky audio message board I frequent, a guy asked the same question to the world, “how do you train your volunteers?”

Hidden within these questions is a deeper question: “How do we train our volunteers to the level of quality and style we expected from our staff?” Some churches are accustomed to certain standards of excellence, and that’s fine because that same excellence is why many people started attending those churches. Cornerstone is no exception. I think of our excellent children’s ministries who have intentionally pushed back to a more volunteer driven model and are slowly seeing great results. It’s a whole new game and it looks like they’re winning. Many people started coming to church here because of our children’s ministry.

Anyway, I preach to myself a lot. Here’s what it sounds like lately…

In this climate, just doing your thing isn’t an option any more. You must become a good leader no matter what your Strength Finders test results tell you. That means you get to do what you love to do less, other people get to do what you love to do more, and you get to learn that people are more important than your sense of quality and style; all within limits of course. To be blunt, it’s just part of growing up. Step up or step aside.

This year I have consciously applied myself to becoming a better leader and I’ve discovered something I hope is helpful for other folks like me.

One of the greatest laws of the universe is this: If you want what other people have you have to do what they do. It’s that simple. You have to trade your old ideas for ideas that work. The hard part is pushing yourself to try something new. The simplicity lies in just doing what other leaders suggest to do.

Of all the leadership books out there today the one that resonates with me the most is “25 Ways to Win with People” by John Maxwell and Les Parrott. It contains short sections with examples of great leadership principles and action steps that are all based on being a good human being if not a good Christian. I hope to do as many of these things this year as I am able. The beauty is they’re simple enough for me to try.

If you find yourself doing something that feels terribly foreign, like writing personal thank-you cards to team members, remember that it doesn’t equate to insincerity just because it’s not your style. Putting your ego aside is always good practice, especially when it comes to team building and volunteer training. Who knows? Maybe we’ll all become better people for it.

I’d sure appreciate comments from anyone with suggestions for good leadership books – short, simple, and with clear action steps.

I get asked about podcasting a lot: how to record, how to edit, how to sweeten, how to compress, how to set up a feed… There’s a lot to it if you want to do it well. If you Google around you’ll find some great resources and it’s easy enough to figure out.

We moved our website to another server this week. Last time we did that (a couple years ago) moving our Podcast RSS feed was a big pain. (The RSS feed is just a shopping list your iTunes checks occasionally to see if there’s anything new to download.) So last time I set up a Feedburner feed in anticipation of ever having to go through it again. I’m pretty thankful to my past self right now for one of the few favors that guy ever did me. By the way, be kind to your future selves. They’ll need all the help they can get. They’ll love you for it.

Feedburner’s free features (like stats) are mindbottling enough but the real beauty for me is that it acts as a proxy feed. Once people subscribe to the Feedburner feed you can move your original feed anywhere without losing subscribers. That’s important because we care very much about quality and, really, we don’t have time to field support calls and emails from hundreds of subscribers having podcast trouble all at once. Also, if your feed goes MIA for too long the iTunes store will drop it. There are ways to move your feed with iTunes (using the tag and pinging iTunes) but it doesn’t work as well or as quickly as you’d hope.

So, no matter where you set up your podcast set up a Feedburner account right after you get your base feed going. I recommend this even if you are using a hosted solution like GoDaddy, Podbean, MySpace or whatever. Burn that feed.

I’ll post more about podcasting in the future but if you have any questions or need advice don’t hesitate to email me: just ’sam’ at this website url.

Screen shots and stats after the jump for anyone interested. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’d like to offer my opinions (not necessarily reviews) about some mics like the KSM9, KMS105, E965 and others just to add my own voice to the crowd.  When you’re considering spending $700 each on microphones it’s good to get as much information as you can as well as take a few for a test drive.

My friend Masaki owns One Way Media Solutions and for the last several months he let me borrow a bunch of high end mics just for the heck of it. I tried them each on at least two people to get a good feel for them.

Keep in mind that a great singer will sound great on any mic the same way a super awesome guitar player can pick up my guitar and make me think, “I was going to sell that? It sounds great!” After spending time with our vocalists at a Vocal Artistry seminar we hosted I was stunned to learn that I have tried to fix poor singing style with expensive mics. That’s another topic. I’m just saying expensive mics are not solutions for vocal troubles.  They’re just the secret sauce for good vocalists.

The mics I’ll list are (except for a couple) around $700 on the street. If a $100 Shure SM58 is a tool in the tool chest, these mics are more like expressive instruments. Great vocalists play their instruments well. Putting a sensitive, responsive mic in the hands of a not-so-great performer could backfire a little so beware.

Also, my views are colored by my goal with our worship mix. If I were out on the road with a band I’d have different things to say. My personal goal is to come as close as possible to the sound of a worship CD. Average worship CD vocals are smooth, even, fresh, and clear; not in your face.  Also, I’m mixing on an Innovason SY80 (a very bright console) and Nexo Geo line arrays with the 8″ mid drivers (very bright as well.)

In any case, I hope these thoughts are helpful to anyone at a church considering  a leap into the world of greater than $600 microphone love.

Mics after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »