How to Mix Worship Music for Church Online

hey guys jake goslin here in this presentation i'm going to walk you through how to mix worship music for church online and i'm going to show you how you can unlock the fundamentals of professional mixing it's it's not as complicated as you may think i hope to demystify a lot of these things for you and i'm going to show you how you can implement the right tools including the right gear and software so that you guys can produce amazing broadcast mixes for your worship bands online many churches have been forced to figure out church online over the past few months and it looks like it's not going anywhere anytime soon and as overwhelming and challenging this season has been for the church i think it's been an opportunity for us to learn how to implement these tools to reach more people online so hopefully we can have that perspective it's a good time to learn some new stuff and to really just increase the reach of our worship ministries and you want to know the number one place where churches get it wrong with their online broadcast well maybe you've already guessed it by now it's audio and when i'm referring to audio and this being a challenge i'm not really talking about capturing good audio from your pastor's microphone because that's a pretty simple setup right you have one microphone not a whole lot can go wrong that's pretty easy the primary challenge is in this area of capturing high quality worship music and mixing it appropriate for an online audience that has been not so easy for a lot of churches and if your mix is mediocre live meaning like if you're standing in the room of your sanctuary in the mix sounds okay online it's going to sound significantly worse that's just sort of the magic of when we publish things online if you if you don't really get things right in person it's just going to sound so much worse when you actually end up streaming or sharing it online so maybe you've asked yourself this question before why does it sound so much better in person at our church than on our live stream why do the vocalists sound off pitch in our broadcast why does it sound so empty so here's what we're going to cover in this training to answer a few of those questions for you and to really hopefully point you in the right direction to build the right infrastructure and master the fundamentals of mixing for your worship ministry first we're going to talk about the fundamental steps for processing audio like a pro and then i'm going to cover the number one gear and software setup for creating a professional broadcast mix no matter the size of your church you may be wondering who is this dude well my name is jake goslin nice to meet you i'm a worship leader i'm also a husband and a father and i live in denver colorado i lead worship at mission lakewood church and then my full-time thing during the week is i'm the creator and the ceo of churchfront churchfront is an online media and education platform for worship leaders so we do lots of fun stuff i make videos a lot for on our youtube channel we make lots of online courses and in trainings and i just honestly i feel like i'm living the dream every single day i get to wake up doing what i love both serving in local church ministry but also equipping others who are in local church ministry as well so here's some photos from the time i got to collaborate with uh the bethel production team and we we shot this really in-depth documentary about how how they do their thing um it was fascinating i learned a ton you can check that out on our youtube channel and we have almost 100 000 subscribers on our youtube channel so i'm trying to get 100k hopefully in the next couple weeks so please go there subscribe would really greatly appreciate the support there but we're releasing new videos every single week uh to help you lead gospel centered in tech savvy worship so maybe you're not the worship leader at your church still may be worth staying in the loop of the latest worship technologies and then uh feel free to share our channel with your worship leaders as well and then we also have an online learning platform that's worship ministryschool.com we have online courses and we pair that with real-time coaching that my team does and it's just a blast meeting worship leaders from all over the world from all types of different churches different sizes a whole lot of fun so you can check that out at worshipministryschool.com a lot of pastors are asking this question right now how can we make our mix sound better because maybe you've heard the mix of like bethel or elevation and you're like that just sounds amazing how do we do that and sadly this is the conclusion most people come to i know let's spend thousands of dollars sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on new gear well unfortunately that is wrong it's not the right answer and it's not the right solution to this problem in most cases and to clarify why this is wrong i like to make this analogy of a basketball player so let's pretend you have a basketball player and they're just not making any of their their shots they can't make a free throw uh they can't make a layup they're just pretty useless basketball player they they can't you know achieve the end goal of the game which is to to make baskets and and to score points and the basketball player may say well it's because i don't have the new 300 limited edition air jordan basketball shoes right or something like that i don't even know if those exist i'm not really a basketball geek but just just stick with the analogy here and if you were the coach of this basketball player complaining that they don't have the right gear in place to make their shots you would say this wrong that's not why you're missing the shots the reason why is is you haven't worked on the fundamentals of the sport of the game that's why you're not winning and i think the same principle applies to mixing audio in our churches for our worship services in most cases the problem isn't with your gear it's that the people running the gear don't know the fundamentals of processing and mixing audio and this isn't to say that gear and software don't play a role they definitely do they can really really make your life a whole lot easier but i always want to warn churches before you go spending tens of thousands of dollars on a broadcast studio or anything with your worship tech ministry make sure the people who are going to be using this gear actually know how to use it they know the fundamentals so that's why in the next few minutes i'm going to show you how the fundamentals of processing audio make a massive difference to your mix and they are the key to unlocking a professional sound and then later on in this presentation i'll go into a little bit more of the specifics of the actual hardware and software setup you'll need to produce a great live stream mix or a great pre-recorded and published later mix i thought the best way for me to demonstrate this to you and show you the fundamentals of mixing is actually to just go ahead and take a session that we recorded for my worship ministry and show you how i would go about mixing it down so that's what i have right here in front of me here's the video file for this session and then here is our multi-track recording of this session and before we dive into this i do want to back up and say you know how we actually captured this in the first place so if you look at this video you can see we're just set up in my janky little office here at churchfront that's where we're recording our the worship portion of our services right now there's three of us in the band so we have kind of a smaller band than usual and then we've got uh three microphones an acoustic guitar and keys so all these instruments and our voices go into our usual mixing console we have the midas m32r it's a great digital mixer it's just like the x32 probably many of you have actually heard of and then we connect the midas m32r to a computer running software like ableton live that's what you see here and when we press record in this software it's going to record all of our vocals and instruments individually so then we can process everything individually within this session and that's how we're able to create this professional mix that you're about to hear so here is our session and then you're going to see all of the different vocals and instruments on are on their own tracks that those the tracks are these little things right here that i'm clicking down this is our timeline so we're seeing you know the timeline of our whole worship set here um from left to right and then you can see the audio waveforms of those audio files as well so we're just going to focus on one instrument and this is gonna be my vocal mic so it's always a little awkward you know exposing my my voice it always like kind of gives you this weird like naked feeling listening back to it later on but i'm gonna do it for the sake of helping you guys understand the concepts of signal processing and how important this is so i'm going to select my vocal track here and when i have this track selected down here i am going to see what is called the plug-in chain or the processing chain for this individual channel if i clicked on a different channel you would see a different processing chain down here so let's just focus on my vocal mic and then when you're looking at this processing chain right here from left to right you're gonna see that the sequence of events happening in the way that my voice is being processed by the software and everything that you see here these types of settings whether it's the eq compression or reverb every single digital mixing console these days comes with these settings built into them and then obviously as you can see here every digital audio workstation like ableton logic pro tools they all come with some sort of plugins that function just like the ones that you're going to see me using in this video so for any instrument you're trying to process for your mix there's generally four things that have to happen there could be more there could be less but let's just kind of go with in most cases there are four processing steps that need to occur the first step is going to be gain and that's what's going to happen in this guy right here this little plug-in the second step is going to be eq or equalization that's right here the third step is going to be your compressor that's right here and then the fourth step is going to be your additional effects like maybe reverb or delay um and any other effects you may want to add to it but the four you see here are the big ones to achieving a really professional sound to your mix right now all these plugins are disengaged they're not on if i hit this little button here you see everything turns yellow that means it is on so right now they are off so for the next few minutes i want to walk through each of these different steps of the processing chain so that i can really demystify these terms for you and then you'll just see the power of the fundamentals of mixing so you know that wow most of the work really is done here it's not necessarily you know because you have the most amazing gear or software in the world is because you know how to work these plug-ins so the first step as i already mentioned is gain it's also known as trim sometimes and think of gain or trim as sort of the regulator of how much signal is coming into your mixing console or your software it's kind of like a water faucet you want it to be nice and strong you don't want it to be overbearing and too much or else it's going to distort and clip that's when the meters hit the top at zero decibels and it's just gonna sound nasty and you also don't want it too quiet because you just won't hear that instrument or vocal and you won't have enough signal going through your processing chain so a general rule of thumb is to make sure the input of your audio is metering at around minus 12 decibels on the the meter that you'll see here in a second so i'll switch to a different view of our tracks here here's my vocal track so you're going to see my vocals metering right here so i'll go ahead and press play and i'll solo my vocal there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me so you can see it's it's metering kind of low we want it to to be peaking around here at -12 so i'll go ahead and i will engage the gain for my vocal channel there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there is another in the fire so you can see how it boosts the signal so that it's strong enough but not too strong so that's just a really fundamental important step to get right make sure your gain is set properly so you have a good strong signal now let's take a look at the second step of the signal processing chain and that is the equalizer so you're probably familiar with eq in your car stereo you've seen the bass and treble settings it's the same thing here but you have quite a few more settings that you can adjust to have way more control over the equalization in the different frequencies of sound within your instrument or your vocal so listen to the difference i'll play it first without eq there is a grave that holds nobody and now here with the eq engaged there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me no eq there is a grave that holds nobody now that power and with eq there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives so especially if you're listening with headphones and you can actually hear this audio really well you would have heard my voice just get much more clear and really it got rid of a lot of the muddiness sound that was in the in the vocal mic and eq is just so so essential to just removing the frequencies that you don't want in a given vocal channel or instrument channel the next step of the signal processing chain is the compressor the compressor is a really important tool that's going to make everything just sound more consistent and smoother a compressor is going to reduce the differences between the loudest parts of your recording in the quietest parts so it's going to see the highest peaks of volume and it's going to compress them down so basically if you're going to look at the waveform of your music instead of the waveform being this tall it's going to go ahead and compress it to being this tall and that's what gives professional music a real consistent smooth sound so you can apply compression to individual channels like a vocal mic or you can also apply it to individual instruments and you can also apply it to your entire mix to smooth out the whole thing that's an important part of what's called the mastering process so i'm gonna go ahead and play it without the compressor engaged and then i'll engage it there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me now i'll engage the compressor there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me so what you're seeing here on this left meter is the input signal and then on the right one is the output signal and then in the middle we have the gain reduction meter so what's happening is when i'm singing louder that gain reduction meter is showing us how it's compressing down the volume of my voice there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me and a compressor allows you to adjust the settings of how quickly that gain reduction happens and how quickly it's going to release you can also adjust the ratio of you know how much decibels of reduction you're gonna get when it comes to how much it exceeds the threshold which is this little point right here there's lots of nuance that you can dial in in a compressor but for the most part all you're doing with it is you're just leveling out that sound in your your individual channels or your entire mix will just sound so much smoother so now what i want to do is a before and after of eq and compression for you so here's no processing with those two plugins there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lit now engage them there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there is another in the fire it's a pretty significant difference and like i said if you're just listening on your phone speakers or your computer speakers maybe you don't hear that quite as well yet but these small tweaks to these individual channels will really add up when you bring everything together into your final mix and then the final step of the signal processing chain is effects and effects include probably most commonly reverb and delay reverb really adds the element of space to your mix and this is important when we're mixing for online because you know if we don't add any reverb it's going to sound really dry you're just not going to have any of that natural ambient sound for your listeners and your online audience so that's why we add reverb so i put reverb on this channel just so you can kind of visualize how that would be the next step in the signal processing chain but generally when you apply reverb to vocals you're going to want to put it in a separate channel also known as a bus or a return channel so you can send all of your same vocals to the same place to get the same reverb applied to them so that's what i have set up here in ableton is this this reverb return bus right here so first let's hear it without it there is a grave that holds nobody and now it's here with reverb there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there's a significant difference and then there's also delay in delay you want to be careful with it can really make the voice sound bigger especially in the bigger choruses of the song but you don't want to apply too much of it or else it can get pretty messy pretty quickly so here's without delay there is a grave that holds nobody now with delay there is a grave that holds nobody so you can hear it's basically taking the audio and then just repeating it and it kind of fades away again i have that set pretty low here you can see the meters all the way down here if i had it louder it would be overbearing yeah i don't even want to listen to that for more than a couple seconds so now listen to my voice with all of the plugins applied to the individual channels and we have reverb and delay engaged there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there is another in the fire and then let me do a quick before and after of all these plug-ins so you can really hear the difference so here's nothing applied to my vocal channel this is just my raw voice there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there is another in the fire and now with everything there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there is another in the fire and then finally if you really want to take your vocals especially to the next level you're going to want to apply vocal tuning so i have my plug-in for that i'm going to grab it real quick and then i'm going to drag it into my plug-in chain i like putting vocal tuning right before the eq so we tune the vocals before we start processing them with with eq and compression and effects so here's what the vocal tuning plug-in looks like i can go and i can set the key so this song is in the key of c major and then i can dial in these tuning settings up here but by default it'll sound pretty good and then what the tuning plug-in is going to do it's going to listen to my voice it knows what key the song's in and if i sing sharp it's going to you know adjust my voice pitch down however much it needs to you'll see the meter go down to the left if in if i'm singing too flat it's gonna um increase the pitch of my voice so that everything is gonna be perfectly in tune so have a listen there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me there is another in the settings of the plug-in out of the box they sound pretty natural you don't really hear that weird auto-tune effect let me go ahead and exaggerate this for you there is a grave that holds nobody now that power lives in me so if you want to lead some edm worship for your church that's all you do is just crank the speed all the way down so what you just saw me do walking through the different steps of this processing chain this is like the 95 percent maybe even more of professional mixing you have to process the individual channels right first and then the last five percent of mixing and this is the the really easy part is just going and adjusting the output faders here everybody thinks this is where all the work's done but it's not it's really in the processing chain that i just showed you so what we'll do is we'll get all of our processing dialed in for the individual channels and then when we're ready to go and do our mix down all that requires is just adjusting these faders so let's say if i were leading a song my fader would be higher if someone else was singing backup theirs would be lower and so on and then we just mix it like that so i already went through and mixed down this session so what i'm going to do is enable all of the tracks i'm going to enable all the plugins so you can have a listen so here's what it sounds like with all of our vocals and acoustic guitar and our keyboard is this is exactly what you see right here on camera [Music] [Music] and now let's listen to it with the backing tracks and if your worship band is not using backing tracks and playing to a click and guide cues they're really missing out listen to the difference here so once this was mixed in ableton i went ahead and exported the mix i combined it with the file that we have here and here's what it looks like standing next to me i'm really pleased with that end result so is our congregation uh so has other folks who've been listening to our recordings online and i'm no recording artist worship leader i don't have the the fanciest most beautiful voice in the world nobody on our team does sure like we're solid but you know a lot of this post-production magic can pretty much make any worship band sound really amazing online so long as they're playing the right notes they're singing in pitch you know you can work a lot of magic after the fact or even during the fact if you have this set up for mixing for a live stream so i just hope you understand now after seeing me kind of build this mix at least a portion of the mix and in processing just one channel of audio how important the fundamentals of processing and mixing are to achieving a pro level mix and now that you understand the importance of fundamental mixing technique now let's talk about the number one gear and software set up to mix worship online so as i mentioned earlier you know a lot of pastors church leaders they want to achieve a better mix and you know maybe they hurt somewhere like hey you know in order to do this we need to get a separate mixing solution which is true we'll talk about that more in a second here but the way they go about addressing this need is they say hey let's go out and buy a whole separate mixing console so when i say mixing console i mean the actual physical hardware uh mixing board that that your church probably already has one in your sanctuary and a lot of pastors get the idea that hey we need to buy a whole separate one for our broadcast room to mix for online and what's correct about that assumption is yes you do need a dedicated mixing console for your live mix for your congregation who's in your sanctuary and then you need a separate mixing solution for your broadcast mix because those audiences need to hear two different things they're in two very different listening environments the audience in your church in the sanctuary they're going to hear the natural reverberation of the room and that heavily affects the mix but the people online are listening through their phone and computer speakers they're not going to have that natural reverberation of the room so the audio has to be mixed appropriately for their context so that's why a lot of worship leaders or tech team leaders or pastors are like let's buy a separate mixing console well that is wrong that's not what you need to do to achieve a great broadcast mix and the reason why this is wrong is that there is a much better way there's a way that's going to sound better like the mixes you you'll actually be able to achieve with this method i'll unpack here will sound so much better than dropping 50 000 on a separate mixing console it's going to cost less this solution that i'm going to show you here perhaps you already have you know the the hardware piece in place and you just need to get some software that costs less than a thousand dollars probably less sometimes less than a couple hundred dollars to get so it's going to cost significantly less to implement this it's also scalable with your worship band you can start with a small setup maybe with just a solo worship leader or a couple people like you saw in our example today or you could have a full-on huge worship band like hillsong worship and the setup still works for them as well so it can kind of scale and grow with your team so here is the solution the solution is to mix your audio in a digital audio workstation or a daw that's short for digital audio workstation mix it in a doll like pro tools ableton live or logic pro that is the secret to building the right broadcast mix infrastructure for your worship ministry and here's what it looks like at our church so here's our mixing console over here we've got the midas m32r and then right next to it we have our laptop the laptop's plugged into the mixing console you can do it over usb there's audio networking solutions lots of easy ways to get this set up it's going to send all of our individual audio channels like our vocal mics instruments etc into this computer running pro tools which is our daw in this case and then in pro tools that's where all the mixing magic happens and then we can either stream that mix live to our video switcher for our online audience or we can just multi-track record in pro tools mix it down during the week and then publish it online later so this works for both a simulated live workflow and a true live workflow and don't take my word for it this is the exact setup that they use at bethel church that's where i got the idea from i visited bethel and their production team they were hosting a conference this day that i was visiting them you can see here the conference going on on their multi-cam viewer right there and this is their mix engineer set up right here so so this guy right here wearing the sweatshirt with the 16 on it he is mixing audio that is then sent out to bethel tv where they stream all their services or maybe they put them on youtube as well and you can see this is pro tools running on the laptop he has some nice in-ear headphones on so you can hear the mix really well you could get some nice studio speakers as well if you don't want to have headphones and that's it like i think a lot of people will be blown away that like that's what bethel is mixing their audio on instead of like one of those gigantic mixing desks that you see you know in in nashville or something like that or in the broadcast studio for major television networks those things are complete overkill and i've heard mixes that churches use with that type of gear and it does not sound nearly as good as bethel like bethel is like the golden standard of of how worship mixes mixes should sound online so i'm not going to copy the people who don't sound great i'm going to copy bethel like i want to sound like them with our live streams and it's possible to do that with this setup you're running pro tools and then just sending your audio in there and mixing it down in this dock so here's the big picture you have your mixing console in your sanctuary it's going to send all the audio to a computer running pro tools it's going to mix the audio and it's going to send that final mix to your video switcher or streaming software or maybe just wherever you want to record that mix too or you can just multi-track record it in pro tools and then publish it later i know we covered a lot in this training but i hope i was able to demystify a lot of what goes into professional audio production for churches you know the first thing we covered was mastering these essentials of processing audio with gain eq compression and verb i showed you you were able to hear the difference of applying these effects to my vocal mic and then you heard the final mix these are the things that do the heavy lifting for creating a professional mix and whether it's yourself or someone else you know on the team at your church who is running a mixing console or digital audio workstation you have to know the basics of processing before you ever are going to come close to achieving a great mix and then when it comes to the actual setup whether you're pre-recording or live streaming worship use a digital audio workstation to mix your audio separately from the mixing console that you already have in your tech booth in your sanctuary this is going to be the most affordable in in the best way to achieve a mix that sounds better in my opinion than a lot of the other solutions um out there you know a lot of the the integrators want you to spend you know thousands and thousands of dollars on big expensive mixing consoles just don't do it i want to save you from doing that and it's just not going to sound nearly as good and that brings us to the end of my presentation thanks so much for listening and watching and like i said i just hope this demystified a lot for you and i hope it's going to save your worship tech team a ton of headache and money down the road so that you can just build the best solution for your ministry to keep up with the latest content my team at churchfront is creating go to youtube just search churchfront and subscribe to our channel there we've also got a podcast we've got a blog just google us we're pretty easy to find and to stay in touch with and i also want to invite you to check out worshipministryschool.com there we have in-depth online courses covering all things worship ministry that may be mixing audio for your worship ministry or maybe even the more pastoral side of planning and leading worship we've just got a ton of trainings and then our team is also available to come alongside you to give you personalized customized advice for your ministry and just be there as a support system for you as well when you have questions or you're trying to troubleshoot things along the way so go to worshipministryschool.com to learn more thank you so much for having me at this church online summit i'm so grateful to have this opportunity and just thanks so much again for listening and keep up the great work in your ministry

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 225,717

Keywords: how to mix worship music, how to mix worship vocals, how to mix worship drums, online church, broadcast audio mixing, mixing tutorial ableton, ableton live, churchfront, churchfront ableton live, jake gosselin, jake gosselin live stream, jake gosselin ableton, jake gosselin churchfront

Id: wW4dGlYwoN8

Length: 31min 15sec (1875 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020