off of having to produce a polished product, shield, drum mic placement is already key for STUDIO RECORDINGS
and chances are you’ll have a lot more fun many, if not most of us. As churches up their One of the big down sides of capturing audio in
and a lot less stress along the way. While it’s Facebook Live and YouTube music broadcast a live environment is the bleed that Michael also
unreasonable to expect your entire team is game, DANTE’s ‘audio data pipeline’ is going mentioned. Akin to light coming through the
going to give you a finished product like People, to play an increasingly important role in creating crack under a door, audio bleeds into places
there are still some really valuable lessons to be separate live and broadcast mixes. Generally where you don’t always want it. I saw Crowder
gleaned from what and how they did it. speaking, the FOH (front-of-house) mixer needs the other night, and like an ever-increasing
to be paying attention to what is happening in number of bands, they’re using circular Drum
First and foremost, Michael went back and the room, while the broadcast mixer needs to Dots’ that act like a mini-drum shield to prevent
found the best versions of the songs and used be solely focused on getting great sound for the cymbals from bleeding into the vocal mics.
those. Whether you’re doing some practice broadcast. That same raw audio feed can also recordings to get your ‘studio legs’, or are be repurposed for recording, which is huge!
serious about putting something out, there are a
While your home or rehearsal space studio
may not offer a better solution, it is vital to
couple of great takeaways from this approach. Akin to how Michael went back to pick the understand the role that the room plays in the
The idea of starting with a great drum track best version of the song, we can go back and recording. There is no easy way to remove the
didn’t die with the 24-track studio. A great pick the best drum take, and build a track in impact of a bad or overly live sounding room
drum track lays the foundation for everything the studio from there. This blended approach from your recordings. With the exception of a
else for a couple of reasons worth mentioning. enables us to capture the enthusiasm, tempo room with proper acoustic treatment (and I’m
It sets the time, dynamics, and the form – the and form from an actual service and in turn not talking about cardboard egg crates), it is
latter of which can be edited digitally. build upon it with ‘scratch’ tracks, some of preferable to track in a relatively dead room and
which might be usable, already in place. This add a bit of ambience to drums after the fact via
One of the reasons we’ve added regular DANTE also gets the team increasingly comfortable plug-in, or by securely leaning a hard surface
content to the magazine (see Jeff Hawley’s with the recording process, which means your on the wall just behind the drummer’s throne
article in this issue), is that DANTE is going services and recordings will get better and to reflect sound into the overhead mics. While
to make it much easier for smaller worship better. the latter solution is about as low tech as you
teams to make their own recordings. As much can get, it works like a charm. See you next
as most drummers don’t like playing behind a month ~ D!
April 2019
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