Worship Mixing Masterclass with Luke Hendrickson - Mix Engineer at Bethel Church

well my name is luke and uh again just glad to be a part of this event with you all i am from bethel church and um i help oversee some audio mixing things there album production play keith keys there as well on some of their albums we're blessed to have an amazing songwriting community there uh you know they somebody just asked moments ago about songwriting and we are just spoiled with a rich base of songwriters there's a bit of a feedback ring that is driving me nuts test one two so um it's been fun to build a partner with those guys you know it's difficult to go very far by yourself it's a lot easier to go far with a team and so we've been able to discover uh greatness in each other through pulling on the strengths of each other and uh i'm not a great songwriter and i know that uh and so i'm able to come alongside songwriters and help them on the things that they're not so great at so it's been great but so today we have a very short class 45 minutes so i'm going to kind of skip some of the inter introductory things and maybe we'll get right to the meat of it so we can really dive in here so mixing i'm going to give you some hands-on stuff toward the end but until then we're just going to talk about some foundational right there that's where it's at i'm going to talk about some foundational things and mixing is a very subjective thing beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so uh if you ask somebody if artwork is good or a song is good and you ask a hundred different people you're gonna get a hundred different answers so you're not gonna there is no perfect mix it's like well this person likes the snare this loud and this person likes the vocal this loud and this person likes it no reverb and this person loves a lot a lot of reverb and so it i'm going to be very careful to hard draw hard lines today i think it's important just to learn the language of say english and then once you've learned that language then you can write your own story but until you've learned the language it's hard to write a story so today we're going to talk about the language of music the language of mixing but then please take that home and write your own story with it break the rules and that's how styles are created and how the beatles and coldplay and all these other greats have have changed the world because they're willing to break the rules but my personal opinion is learn the rules first before we break them so let's just talk about some of those suggestions aka rules the theory of mixing we just talked about that setting the stage it's important to have fresh ears uh your ears get fatigued if you listen to a lot of loud stuff all the time and so you don't want to mix right after you mowed the lawn outside or you ran a chainsaw for a while or you had your windows down on a long road trip all of those things cause your ears to hear things differently it's called temporary threshold shift you want fresh ears when you do critical mixing so i highly encourage you to protect your ears weird ear plugs if you're doing something noisy don't drive down the highway with your window down like that will cause cause permanent damage if you do that for a long time uh get a little uh iphone app uh in niosch i believe is the niosh is like the national organization for sound pressure levels and they they decide what is safe and what is not safe and there's a little iphone app that you can download that can measure wherever you're at to see if it's safe or not for your ears and it'll tell you like how long you can listen to it and so um just protect your ears it's going to be a career this is going to be a lifelong thing so plan for it and um somebody talked about you know your if if your life is a dollar everything costs you something right i call it real estate so you have mental real estate you have sonic real estate and so um everywhere everybody wants to live downtown in a sound mix and where is downtown downtown is like all this red right here between 100 hertz to 600 hertz everybody wants to live downtown and so a good mix is one that carves out little areas so that things can live and not be on top of one another you want to push things out into the suburbs and less downtown so all the red here is the fundamental frequency of that particular source so the male vocal is between 100 hertz up to 900 hertz and then the yellow and the black is more the harmonics of that of that instrument or voice the red is the loudest part of whatever this element is look how cluttered 100 hertz to 600hz is there's so much energy in that area so our goal as a mixing engineer is to get rid of the stuff that doesn't belong and make room for the stuff that does belong so you're going to be using high and low pass filters and that is just an eq that just like gets rid of all the bass or gets rid of all the high end and you're going to be applying that to various channels so that you can create a pocket for something to live because it's sonic real estate is how i see it uh starting the mix um i like idea is to ideally you want to keep things sounding as neutral as possible as natural as possible um but the more layers you have the more cluttered it can become so if it's just a guitar vocal you want a lot of low end in your acoustic guitar because you need something to fill in that space it's going to sound huge but as soon as you introduce a bass guitar that low end is going to get cluttered from the acoustic guitar's low end so that's when you make a change so the more layers you create the more you have to organize so just be careful on how you're building the mix and be aware of how complex or how many stacked elements do i have a really great pop song these days only has like five elements like it's a very simple production you can usually tell the difference between a newbie and a total boss a total pro by how many layers they are putting into their song newbies when they when something's not feeling right they almost always gravitate to put another layer on something put more reverb on something put a delay on something and that's the opposite of what should be happening back up take a bunch of stuff away and find one sound that's incredibly compelling you want something that is uh ear grabbing unique special and it can just be one instrument with a crazy tone and a cool melody line and that's all you need with maybe kick snare and a little chunky acoustic guitar or sorry electric guitar off to the right you know it's like if you listen to what's big right now it's very simple production very simple production so um starting the mix keep things natural until things get cluttered and that's when you got to start shaving things okay moving on here i usually start with the drums if i'm going to build a mix introduce the bass guitar introduce the acoustic the acoustics and electrics make sure all that's feeling really glued really great now putting the vocals later doesn't mean the vocals are less important i would probably after i do that mute all of that and solo the vocal make that vocal sound unbelievable all by itself no instruments required and usually it's a lot of compression a lot of eq some stereo widening some chorus some reverb delay different types of delay there's there's a lot of varieties there some modulation on your stuff to create the kind of this chorusing effect and if you have vocal doubles which means they've sung up multiple times you can start doing panning and work on your your 3d space a little bit and then you bring your band back in but the vocals should never be compromised the vocals should never feel at odds or in competition to the band in my opinion the most important part of a song is the message that it's me that is being told and so the lyrics the voice the voice has to be clearly heard it has to be unmistakable very easy to identify with and so you're working on two different things make them sound awesome then put them together and you're going to make a few subtle tweaks here and there there's something called masking which when one instrument is very similar to another instrument and they're playing the same thing masking happens and it's hard to hear which is doing what and so as a mixing engineer you start working on how do i make space to where i know what each of them are doing and it can be done with panning so one is to the left and one is to the right if they're doing similar things then your ears can figure out what's going on or it might be with eq stuff going on so vocals and instruments a lot of time masking can happen a vocal singing the same thing that the guitar is playing and they're blurring together and you're not sure which is which so you just got to be kind of mindful of some of that stuff okay uh this is some general ideas on the drums um kick snare i mentioned high pass filters here you guys can speed read here if you like i'm trying to get to the fun stuff here quickly chordal instruments high pass filter everything what belongs in the low end kick and snare i'm sorry kick and bass that's where that's what belongs down there so you're going to high pass filter everything above say 200 hertz or 400 hertz depends on what instrument we're talking about here so that you leave room for that kick and bass guitar right uh the vocals you might high pass up to 200 250 even 300 depending on where that vocal is i like a male vocal you want more low end a female vocal you generally want less low end so it's not there's not a fixed setting here it's just like these are some general targets and see what sounds good panning here we talk about how to create space how to create a 3d image i'm a big fan of stereo everything never record as a mono guitar or a mono keyboard or a mono reverb or mono overhead if you're doing that just start over delete everything it's it's worth it stereo is everything it really is uh there is no let me let me tell you this tell you this there is no real world application where mono happens on natural planet earth mono is impossible nearly impossible to create in a real world environment and here's why you say well my mouth is mono right there's only one mouth creating noise but you're not hearing direct sound you're hearing indirect sound indirect sound makes everything stereo so you're hearing my voice mono and then you hear the reflections on the wall and the floor and whatever else is in the room and you are hearing stereo everything in life is stereo everything is stereo you're hearing reflections you're hearing direct sound and indirect sound in every environment so the idea of recording a mono something and listening to it with earphones is extremely alien to how humans are supposed to hear anything not just music but anything and so um i'm a huge advocate from stereo everything including pas and i won't get on that soapbox too much but um yeah i will leave that one alone pa should always be stereo there is no reason to ever go mono in a pa okay compression compression is really great for making things sound big and fat it does the opposite of what it sounds like so compression squeezes the tops of the mountains which makes the perceived valleys higher so the more dynamic the mix means it's wider this way so high peaks and low valleys so the pro of that is is it is it's punchy it hits you really hard but the the downside of that is when you're driving down the highway in your car and something called the noise floor in your car is high which means the road noise from the highway and the wind on your car and the baby crying in the back seat makes your noise floor really high which means your margin for being able to hear things is very small if you're in a quiet theater where there's no distractions your noise floor is incredibly low so you can be very dynamic in your music opera music orchestral music movie scores are incredibly dynamic because it's intended to be heard in a very quiet sound stage modern music pop music is never almost never listened to in a quiet perfect environment and so the need to create a very narrow listening window through compression is highly desired these days not not distorted with hard limiting i'm definitely anti that but through creating a very narrow window of your your peaks are this loud and your valleys are this loud allows you to drive down a highway with noisy environments and still hear the verse just fine and the chorus doesn't you don't have to turn it down on the chorus it's just nice and smooth the whole way around so experiment with compression there's right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it uh but uh through a lot of trial and error error i think you'll get um quite familiar with it parallel processing is something where you run something through two different processes at the same time and you blend the outputs of those two to a flavor that um you desire so you could do parallel compression which means take your drums and run it through a compressor that's barely doing anything or and also take your same drums and run it through a compressor that's crushing the heck out of it and then you blend those two outputs to your desired taste you can do the same thing with eq parallel eq so you run one vocal through five different eqs and then you blend all those different eqs to your perfect desire you could do parallel delays parallel reverbs parallel any parallel anything but it's a great tool to potentially get a sound that you can't get without doing parallel stuff busing helps you organize stuff so it's like taking eight drum channels and putting it into one bus so instead of taking eight faders up and down you just take one and it just simplifies things buses are really great for speed it helps you kind of get things done less distractions in a live mix features are sexy and flashy it's like oh man i need more features i need more plugins i need more things to touch right in reality there's the law of diminishing returns so the more features you create it actually slows you down and it creates you it um creates more options or opportunity for errors error-prone um operations so uh to me i'm a big fan of simplicity if it's if it if you have to think really hard about something in a live environment you're probably doing it wrong because in a live environment speed is so important stability is so important so try to build whatever you're doing in a way that like i can quickly get there get in get out and you don't have to think too hard about something and as soon as you start to daisy chain a lot of stuff together um you can push one button and it destroys everything so just be kind of careful about how flashy features can sound i'm a big fan of what's called the ssl channel strip because in one plugin you can do nearly everything it's not because i think it sounds the best it's because it's so easy it's just brain dead simple you open it up and then it's one channel strip you can do everything in that one less chance for error less chance for messing things up okay reverb can help can add a space or warmth to your sound but be careful not to apply too much because it can just blur things and you can actually hear the the character or the texture in somebody's voice right delay is the same thing it can add a lot of width but too much of it can kind of steal away from identifying the personality of that person the personality of the snare the personality of the guitar because it's just smeared so there's right ways to do it there's wrong ways to do it let me back up there's ways that some people will like and there's ways that some people will not like right because there is no right or wrong we're in we're in an artistic culture and artistic field and so um i think what i'm talking about here is just generally acceptable things in our today's society double tracking is amazing double tracking means you play it twice the exact same way twice so i could do an acoustic guitar with two microphones one here one here and an xy pattern play it put it through two speakers it'll sound nice and stereo it'll sound good but what if i took one microphone recorded it hit stop hit rewind record it the exact same way second time you take the first take and put it on the left speaker the second take and put it on the right speaker opposite for you guys and that acoustic guitar is going to be huge it'll be a mile wide that's called double tracking so you can do stereo tracking or double tracking but mono is never an option right remember that yes yes got it so if you say i want wide let's do stereo if you want crazy wide do double tracking and you can double track anything you can double track drums that's that's crazy you could double track guitars keys vocals anything you can double track i may not double track bass or kick like that's a little bit weird because low end doesn't harmonize well high-end harmonize as well low-end doesn't harmonize well and get this fluttery flammy type of stuff okay this is a a visual representation of what might be a good mix when you close your eyes and listen to your favorite record our favorite celine dion record you know she's uh she's awesome right yeah no okay and you listen to the mix when i close my eyes this is how i see the mix with my mind's eye i can hear the kick drum down low in the center i can hear the vocal more in the mids but right in the center i can hear the organ over on the left hand side and the vertical axis is your frequency the horizontal axis is your is your panning i can hear the brass section the horn section way up high it's a higher frequency but look how wide it is they put some monster panning on each one of the brass parts where they put some reverb really wide the guitar delays over to the right-hand side there's a little tambourine right the middle the hi-hat is way up high just nice and crispy in a tiny little pocket but you know what this does remember we talked about real estate sonic real estate this gives every place a home and they're less on top of one another and that way you can listen to the same song 10 different times and every time you listen to it you hear something new you hear something fresh oh i heard the song five times but now i'm listening to it and i'm only paying attention to the background vocals and you can do it because there's room for the background vocals now i'm going to listen to it again i'm just going to listen to the all the wet effects the reverbs and the delays on everything could be the guitars or the vocals now i'm going to listen to it again and just listen to the low end what's going on in the low end and each time you're going to learn something new that's what a really great mix does it makes you want to hit repeat it makes you want to play it again because there's it's taking you on a journey and you're hearing a story that has new elements to reveal each time you probably watch the movie inception right that it's complex and every time you watch it oh wow i learned something new i didn't notice it the first time and that's what a good song does and even lyrically if you're a songwriter you want to be doing the same thing is put a little mystery in your lyrics so the next time around you can fill in the blanks that you missed the first time so when you're mixing consider closing your eyes listening to what you're doing and say where's the shelf that i'm going to put this element on so it doesn't overlap something else and the more elements you have generally the worse it's going to sound once again don't try to fix a problem by putting another layer on or by putting another effect on is it possible just to find one compelling tone that just makes your jaw drop that's that's the the better way to approach this thing and then mastering is the final element of uh or phase of just kind of like smoothing things out a lot of guys will say we'll just fix it in mastering well i'm going to get a world-class mastering engineer so it's going to sound huge fully disagree with that everything starts at the source greatness starts at the source a bad song is always a bad song no matter how much you produce it or mix it or master it but greatness always starts at the source so where are you going to put most of your money where are you going to put most of your attention at the very beginning mastering is the last thing you're ever going to do so that's where the very last dollar should be spent the most of your money should start right here get great songwriting great songwriting and then what's next a great artist which means a great singer great musician and then the gear that they're using so that's way more important than mastering mastering is less than one percent of the greatness of your album and then after that is the you know the gear they're using the stuff they're tracking it on the mixing engineer actually let's back up the producer doing all the post edits like how are they like cleaning everything up is everything quantized and tuned and everything and then mixing and then mastering so make sure you uh consider what is important to making an impact with your music you know start at the source there's nothing more important than that okay before we move into pro tools do we have any questions um phase issues no not really where's the headphone output on this computer did we plug in a headphone output atom if they're wanting to hear the music or should i put it through the hdmi out i might be able to can the hdmi out do audio audio oh look at wow you're already set up dude yeah man somewhere i think it's over i use one all the time yes yes please but don't make that your first thing your intuition and your heart should be the first storyteller and then you go to the spell check the spell check my spell checker doesn't write a story my heart writes the story and then i go to spell checker to make sure that it's going to be received well and that's how i see a spectrum analyzer yes i use those all the time they're great anybody see headphone on here no maybe i have to restart pro tools hmm this is going to be fun guys this is going to be fun yes uh sorry a phase somebody said something about phase parallel processing if your parallel processing is done through two different outboard gears or two different devices then when it comes back from its parallel processing you could have phase issues but if your both of your paths your signal chains are equidistant or equally latent then uh latency doesn't matter most do but i guess in a rare occasion you could run into a latency compensation problem headphone yes uh we had another question here i think grace point right yeah very much yeah uh what effects apply to both eq and compression apply to both high pass filter which is eq applies to both double tracking does not um mastering kind of does kind of does not you could stereo on these speakers i don't know if this is stereo or not but yeah so let me let me dive into that for a second um people are who are anti-stereo for the pa they say well my room doesn't fit p stereo it's like it doesn't work because our room is too wide or too narrow or to this or too that like let me tell you why stereo is always the right choice they they're usually their argument is like why would i pan the guitar over to the right side of the room when the person on that side won't be able to hear the guitarist it's pointless right so we need the same mix for everybody wrong wrong here's an example that's not how you run stereo this is how you run stereo a piano has two outputs right a left and a right is the left louder than the right channel no they're the same loudness and if you just listen to the left one it's piano and if you just listen listen to the right one it's piano so this is how you do it you pan the left piano here and the right piano there everybody hears piano but when you're in the middle of the room it's magic nobody's missing anything but when you're in the middle of the room that's the only place you want to be because it's so much more impacting and guitar amps would be the same way guitar players run your pedal boards into a true stereo reverb and delay output into two amps a fender pro sonic and a ac30 mic both of them panned one to the left and one to the right everybody here's electric guitar but when you're in the middle and those two are combined with true reverb true delay with two amps nothing compares and you'll never go back drum overheads same way you have two drum overheads they're both hearing the kick they're both hearing the snare and this one's over on this side once on this side everybody hears the drums but when you get in the middle what happens can you guess the word i'm going to use magic right and you'll never go back so stereo is always the right choice and if your room is super wide then guess what it can do left right left right left right it's always a good choice always okay we got pro tools open here yes this was our worship school in 2019 completely live mix and you'll notice we have a lot of channels here uh and for the most part we just have one plugin going across all these channels this is the ssl channel strip i talked about it earlier why do i love it not because it's the best in the world because it's easy it's easy it's very hard to mess up the law of diminishing returns the more complex you make it the more error prone you're going to be so this is just a nice simple tool to use let's see if we hit play if it works this might blow the speakers up so be careful all right i should be playing right now i hope [Music] so uh this mix is intended for a perfectly tuned room with perfectly tuned speakers i have no idea what it sounds like out there so i'm gonna hit play and i'm gonna come out to you guys to hear what it sounds like that'll be fun huh [Music] me [Music] is [Applause] is [Music] oh [Music] till it is complete with my mind says [Music] for me [Music] [Music] here it is [Music] okay this system appears to be a weird lcr type of thing or left right center thing so i pan the vocal left and right and you'll notice it sounded weird like his buckle moved from here to here to here uh so i'm just kind of figuring out what the system is like i've never played the song in this room before in my life so obviously it sounds way different than it was intended to sound but uh [Music] so this the left channel is right here and the right channel is out there on both sides so it's an unusual setup here but hey it's kind of stereo it's better than mono better than like completely mono so i'm proud proud of them um so you'll see what's going on here uh we have the drums uh you have the bass guitar you have two stereo guitar players so um if i were to get rid of some of this stuff here here's guitar player one left and right guitar player two left and right um a bunch of stereo keys so stereo keys one two three four some of those are tracks and then we have five vocalists the lead vocalist is this person here and then we have six crowd mics um let's see here i think they're labeled down here so you can see we have the stage ones out in the room and then some up in the ceiling the stage ones are out wide kind of like um kind of like on the edge of whatever that screen is right there that's kind of a comparable measurement of our room and then the ones in the room would be out in the middle of the room out there kind of hanging from the ceiling on these uh poles that are retractable and the ones called ceiling here are down stage center right above the preacher's head like up there on a blown line bar doing like a orft type pattern so with this it gives you redundancy so when one person does something wild in front of one microphone it doesn't destroy the whole audience mix the more locations you have the more redundancy the smoother the audience response is going to sound and so if you listen to just one you'll hear kind of a just a one representation of what the room is the next one and the next one [Music] all together there's no editing this is a hundred percent live this is what it sounded like when we live mixed your live mix in a daw it gives you unlimited tools vocal auto tune you saw tuning right there and it's happening live you don't have to rewind it's completely live if you want to hear what the mix sounded like when it was live i just unmonitored this output and this was my live mix from 2019 so here we go when you hit solo nothing happens because you're only listening to the mix the printed mix of two years ago input monitor to build a new mix okay um so what's the question is there a point in which the sound pressure gets so high that you lose that spatial relationship yeah so i i'm i'll take a stab in the dark of what you're talking about loudness we don't like loud stuff and so um at the church we have two services in the morning our loudness maximum in the room is 88 db for the early service and the second service is 92 db and that's peak volume so the average is way lower than that at front front of house position uh i don't it probably depends on the amp that you're using and the speakers that you're using we have a pretty nice line array system in our sanctuary so it can handle just about anything you throw at it and it's a linear system but actually you know we're using the meyer minas which is not um our particular pa in our church um the eq changes as you drive it more when you pull things down the eq is changing a good system doesn't do that it's actually a it doesn't matter where your volume is at the eq is the same and so yeah i guess it would depend on where you're at i had some room calibration thing on here earlier that i just realized let me play with that off and see what it sounds like it's pretty similar uh great any questions wow we got a few let's start right here with pablo you know blending it in but it starts adding more reverb the room reverb yes starts adding in and i'm having trouble getting people without adding that so two things uh if the audience isn't singing it's not gonna work so number the most important thing is the audience has to be singing secondly is you want a quiet room a dead room completely dead this is mildly dead but i'm actually truthfully i'm hearing a ton of reflections of my own voice up here so it i would say it's only about 20 dead like it should be basically you want to litter every square inch of your room with at least two inch or four inch pressed fiberglass and what that does is remove or at least mitigate or minimize the amount of reflections which allows the signal to noise ratio to be healthier to make room for other questions back here getting the room quieter so reflections are your worst enemy the good mix is high signal low noise with everything so anything on the stage that's making noise is your enemy so guitar amps are off stage drums should be quiet in some way either you put them in a room that's massive that the room can actually go somewhere or if you don't have a room for them to go in then you cage them like either way you got to do something because enemy is the sorry noise is your worst enemy with a good mix and a reflect in a reflective room is the worst thing also a point source pa point source speakers is the opposite of a line array point source means the sound just goes everywhere vertical horizontal everywhere and that's bad you want very focused pas like a line array that is surgical precision that puts right on your audience and not on the ceiling and not on the floor not on the sides and you get a splay that's just right and you get the um the width just right whether it's 130 degrees 150 degrees 90 degrees in order to just get the target of your audience and nobody else that'll help yes yes there's different levels of proficiency yeah shelving is shelving as eq and it to me live mix and studio mix is the same thing uh the only op the only difference is you get to hit the rewind button but the mix is the exact same thing like i want it to be eq'd well compressed well good wet effects and i want to be to have auto tune you can do that live and in the studio i want drum replacement you can do that live and in the studio there is no difference between any of those things so shelving is just another way to eq and yeah i use shelving all the time yeah so there's subtractive eq and additive eq i'm a subtractor which means um if when you open your eq plug-in let's just look at the vocal here so if you look at this ssl here i the only boost i'm adding is 1.5 db at 14k everything else is i get rid of up to 260. i lower 10db at 370. i lower 8 db at 900. i lower 5 db at 2k so i'm a subtractive guy and to me i found that most guys in the pro field except for chris lord algae is a subtractive eq guy chris lord algae loves to boost and when he boosts he boosts he loves that stuff but he's a legend and it works so there's no right or wrong it's that's just my personal approach all right anybody else live yes person that's right um i attended a service at your church in 2018 and that completely just floored me yeah because i was sitting in center about third and i row it as just this humongous wow i mean it was one of the most amazing experiences i ever had like in person live worship um because it wasn't an arena it was actually a fairly small church my question is it might be an elementary question for audio mixing for you but what are really the just hot point fundamentals of how you to make it sound huge and it's still quiet that's great the phrase i use is it's the loudest quiet mix you'll ever hear it's the loudest it's the loudest quiet mix you'll ever hear and the biggest kicker right here is this your signal to noise ratio when you're fighting stage volume you have to turn it up louder louder louder louder louder to overcome the enemy the enemy's chasing you down so you just gotta fight fight fight and get above it right no why would he do that just get rid of the enemy altogether and you can have a super punchy mix at a very quiet volume that's number one so get your stage volume to near zero all reflections in your room gone like completely treat every square inch of your room get a line get a line array pa that is surgical precision on your audience with no other bouncing of any kind so when you hear it you're hearing it once you're not hearing it twice you're not hearing it five times you're hearing it once if there's an echo fix it that's the biggest thing and the next is a really great tone and great eq great compression if everything has a pocket you don't have that all this crazy build up at 4k and it's like ouch ouch that hurts that hurts no it's actually like perfectly smooth if we look at our frequency analysis here i might i haven't actually practiced this on this session but see how it's a nice smooth yellow line there it's for the most part pretty smooth you want that if you've got these weird spikes and valleys you've got a bad mix so signal to noise ratio getting really healthy no noise really targeted pa here at once not twice really good eq compression and you can have the loudest quiet mix you'll ever hear and 92 db will sound like 105 db if it's if it's treated that way yes both yeah the sound is the same on on either way there the approach doesn't change so what you're seeing right here is our broadcast mix but what he's talking about is our live in the room mix and it's the same i mean it's not we use different tools to get there but the approach is the same we still use the ssl plug-in we still do subtractive eq we still use the same instruments and we're using the same room with the same microphones yes more than buying a new pa more than buying a new drum kit more than buying another microphone none of that matters treat the room that is way more important than anything else you got to get in a dead room otherwise you're going to be fighting an uphill battle when a hurricane is trying to push you down there's no way to win we've got no more minutes um if we're going to truly abide by the 45-minute rule so okay five more minutes for questions kids let's go great question yeah reflections signal to noise ratio i'm going to preach this again i will preach this to the day to day when you hear it once it is dramatically better than hearing it two times 10 times 100 times there's direct sound and there's indirect sound so i think that will help out a lot when you treat your room and you get a liner apa versus a point source pa yeah you could i don't know if you're suggesting put it around your head that would be interesting um but yes it'd be like these panels but on steroids like get about three times the amount of these and maybe thicker ones um just everywhere just like be ridiculous with it it's gonna look yeah when you walk into a movie theater like that room is dead right and they spend a lot of money getting that room dead but why do you do that so that the intended portrayal of that movie is accurately received so the video looks right the sound is right you're not hearing the room reflections of that movie theater that you're in you're hearing the direct sound that the director and the film score guy intended you to hear and they're doing that by having soft walls soft seats soft human bodies everything is soft so that everything is absorbed and you hear it once um we also have some other rooms in our facility that have a kind of like a live stream to our local facility so basically like a side room and that potentially could be a solution if this room is really terrible for you you just go to a side room that is deader and more treated potentially like a nursing mother's room i'm just being ridiculous here but that might be a way to get away from the reflections if it's too much money to put up treatment anybody 3 45. wow man there is a god he's amazing uh well let's go to 3 30 and have some questions then i'll dive into a few topics and now that we have all this extra time yes sir or basically what i'm doing on the board i just have played on the board until i get yeah because i'm i'm basically leading the production team so i need to be able to whenever a guy comes in wanting to learn from the house i can mix [Music] music is like a language isn't it yeah you know you learn how to play violin or piano or something like it's not something you just do overnight you got to spend a lot of time on that and learning the english language or chinese or any other language you got to be exposed and the best way to do it is just jump in the middle of that culture and you don't have a backup plan there is no backup plan you just go and that's the quickest accelerated path to learning and uh music um theory is that way but so is mixing producing mixing is that exact same way the best way to get great is time it's time you don't need you don't want a backup plan when you have a backup plan it's not going to work out well so give a hundred percent at it and you're probably going to do about a hundred projects wrong before you do something that you're actually proud of long term i've started this when i was like 14 years old i'm 38 now so over 20 years and the first probably five years of albums i would not want to show anybody because i was still learning the language of music right and so uh my best advice would be um a lot of time and just throw them to the wolves it's like pushing them out of the nest and say you'll figure it out it's okay where there's where there's a will there's a way but uh it is sometimes easier to learn the language when you get a textbook right sometimes textbooks textbooks can help and to me music textbooks look like listening to stems audio stems what is an audio stem well have i created some i think for this other product this is not part of the program here so like say this is just a random project i'm doing in cleveland but uh let's do give me jesus so you have the full mix of give me jesus here this might be crazy loud i don't know [Music] so that's your full mix but then stems you can solo stuff out so here's your you vocals the electric guitars [Music] drums the click cello this is live so it's all kind of messy but the bass guitar but by doing this you can learn what is good bass guitar tone what is good drum tone what is good vocal tone it's sometimes hard to hear it when there's a lot of distractions so when you're listening to your favorite coldplay record or celine dion record right yeah because we're all celine dion fans um then everything is merged together and you're like what is that base tone i'm not really sure because there's so much going on i can't hear the bass so find the stems and you can solo the bass guitar and learn what is good bass tone and then you go to your bedroom or to your church and you start turning knobs until your bass tone sounds like that bass tone and once you figure it out they're like okay great let's move on to the next one let's work on our drum tone that snare drum is sweet let's continue to refine my snare until it can sound like that solo stemmed snare tone so those are that's the equivalent of a textbook to me you have intuition and then you have a textbook you want to do both but stims are really great for textbook learning um let's see here man we have a surprise 13 minutes left right now and we could continue to go with questions but i'm debating do we jump into some a meal of some sort a delicious snack what should we do here because i was rushing trying to hit that that deadline let's look at um a vocal chain vocal chain is pretty important right i generally will again the source is the most important thing so what's the key to a good sounding vocal any guesses a great singer exactly if you have michael buble arguably one of the best male vocalists ever or mariah carey for the female equivalents i mean in my mind those guys are the best you make them sing on a sure sm57 an 89 microphone are they gonna sound terrible they're going to sound incredible on an 89 microphone we are so tricked into thinking that we need to buy that 3 000 neumann in order to sound like chris martin that's not going to work nothing's going to make you sound like chris martin no microphone no preamp no compressor no reverb unit it's going to make you sound like chris martin so you just got to accept that that's like foundational what am i going to do with my music is your source good so signal chain most important is your voice what's the next most important thing the microphone that's right what's most important after that yep there's several things in there could be the preamp preempt colors it a tiny bit i might actually say eq eq has a massive influence on the sound of the vocal to me i compress after eq so it's eq first compression second and i'll show you how this is done here so if we look at the lead vocal yes sweet it works um we start with this this is our channel strip i'm not using the compression in this channel strip here i'm just using the eq so this is a high pass filter just getting rid of all the low end if i bypassed the eq this is what his voice would sound like for me kind of cloudy right let me remove the effect so we can just hear the dry tone for me a lot of low end right but if we add the eq in your reload for me i'm gonna say caveat massive caveat this room and this pa is not flat and there's a ton of reflections going on so the intended target here what you're hearing is not what it should be but it's going to be close uh so after that after it's eq'd i will throw it into auto-tune and you i'm not i'm a massive fan of auto-tune i never stream without it for 11 years at bethel church we have auto-tuned our vocals every time every session every singer for 11 years and if you put it in the right key at a gentle retune speed it's completely transparent for 11 years people have loved it and so it's something like this it's antares auto tune in my opinion it is the golden standard for live vocal auto tune there's other competitors out there this is the best there's a lot of versions of this company there's antares autotune pro artists live efx i'm using the cheap one on this one because it's my personal travel license at home we use auto tune pro but this is what it looks like when you hit play you can see it correct in real time for me who can guess what key that's in c sharp d flat right because you can see what notes he's playing it'll show you these little things he ends on the three me that's in the f and that's the three in the scale so i know it's the key of c sharp so i come up here i put it in the key of c sharp or d flat right there alto tenor is fine you put the retune speed at kind of a gentle speed i could slam it and make it sound like t-pain [Music] that's not real right so we're going to slow it down i'm never i'm not a fan of that for worship maybe for pop music but worship people want something that feels real right it's got to feel authentic to who the story is being told by so let's hit play now for me great very believable but it's not distracting with off-tune vocals who likes to listen to off-tune vocals nobody that's why 99 point something percent of all pop music these days have tuned vocals like there is no if you try to say that you you need to remove auto-tune it's like well then you're going to fight against 99.9 something percent of all popular pop music these days like whose side how much who's gonna win when it's like point one percent of somebody against everybody else you're on a losing battle there so after that i like to compress i'm a big fan of the la2a you can smack the heck out of it and it still sounds really smooth for me i've decided so it's probably only getting uh 3d reduction for the most part after that it goes into the la uh sorry the 1176. for me i've decided i love the speed and the crunch that this adds but if you put the 11 76 too hard push it too hard it gets distorted and kind of like crunchy sounding and for a lead vocal that's a little too much so i do the la2a first to take care of all the big stuff and then the 1176 after that so that never gets pushed too hard i like the energy that it creates i just don't want to push it too hard otherwise it gets crunchy compression is more than just compression it's actually adding tone and texture to your sound get to know different types of compressors because they all sound a little bit different after that it goes into a multi-band compressor like a c6 this compresses different bands in different ways so this is low end mid highs and mid high mids and highs for me i've decided i'll not give it up great and after that it goes into a de-esser got your love for me i've decided i'll not give it up you won't give up on me come on shout it your love is holding on and it won't let go great eq autotune compress ds and then wet effects right here's the wet effects here's reverb uh just crank it just for fun without it i've decided um back to where uh acceptable level might be great and then we have delay and this is a a stereo delay it's a eighth on one side and a dotted eighth on another side so it goes like a polyrhythm so let's see it's that kind of a delay so you have a little bit of left right activity and some center activity happening all at the same time i'm a big fan of that and you can listen to what that sounds like here there's a little modulation in there uh 15 the rate of 1.5 hertz so it kind of adds a little pitch variation which is kind of nice and then some slap delay here this is very fastly it's like 120 milliseconds maybe let's see what it is i can't remember uh 128 milliseconds and 166 so it's a stereo slot delay it's not mono remember everything's stereo right wider is better always so let's listen to what that sounds in a like stereo pa where like this is left and this is right the other way around versus lcr this is like an amazing thing it makes your vocal sound huge so let's put these back in a reasonable uh level here hit play and if you're feeling extra saucy then you pan your background vocals left and right does nothing really so i'm gonna just ignore panning um but yeah background vocals you might consider panning left and right a little bit not crazy it's it's all to taste but a signal chain like that i think you're going to find a really great result eq autotune compress ds then your wetfx and that's true for live or studio it doesn't matter it's all the same principles yes yeah you'll see that there's no reverb on any of the individual channels i'm using buses and that's an efficiency thing so like i said earlier the law of diminishing returns there's a lot of flashy things that sound sexy and really cool because you can do look how i can stack so many things on an individual channel that's really great but then that's one more thing to lose track of because you're already thinking about how many channels we have here like 64 channels to think about and you're going to think about all 12 reverbs that you have on all the individual channels like that's no way a human can do that so i have two reverbs and two delays two reverbs two delays one's for the drums uh reverb for the drums and one reverb for the vocalist and the delays is both for the vocals [Music] yep is it because it sounds the best no it's because it's manageable in a live environment be very careful about flashy features if you're using more than two reverbs and two delays you may reconsider unless you're superman or unless you only have like eight channels to work with but when you have 64 channels the human brain just can't multitask like that it's just too much so try to find ways to simplify your show and you'll notice the vocal signal chain here all these this cluster of inserts that's the most complicated part in the whole mix look at everything else one insert all the way across the board the preach has a de-esser on it everything else is just here's the guitars it's ssl and then you put an 1176 after it or an la2a after it very simple for the sake of simplicity for the sake of speed for the sake of less error prone stuff if you're mixing front of house if you're mixing broadcasts and something wigs out that's kind of a big deal if you're in the studio and something wigs out who cares hit stop and hit rewind nobody's paying attention in a live environment they get the rules are different the rules are different yeah is that adam back there yeah um all the time so our 8 a.m service we talked about earlier today is kind of our rehearsal as a church and we broadcast the 10 30 right what happens in between those two services sorry conversations that's right our production team has developed a really great friendship with our worship team and many times it's the same person like i'm on the worship team and i'm on the production team so you want to create a really healthy conversation there where it's not on us versus them i challenge the production team to join the worship team and the worship team to join the production team you're going to learn a lot because both sides have a story to tell but between those two services the worship team comes back to this broadcast room the studio room which is also our green room it's one room and we sit on couches we have breakfast together at 9 00 a.m and we listen back to the session and we check out that guitar town we check out that harmony that wasn't quite right or we say hey the song might be a half step too high or too low let's grab a guitar off the wall and there's a piano there and we can kind of noodle around till we find something that feels right or how about that drum fill do we we think we let started out a little too earlier you sped up on this section more often than not we celebrate more than we criticize more often than not that's a great way to develop a friendship is celebrating somebody so make sure you use that sandwich method effectively you love them you slap them you love them again you know that kind of thing you know all right guys thanks for coming today and uh i guess we've got more stuff coming up later on so be blessed we would love for you to join us at our next churchfront live gathering go to churchfrontlive.com to see our schedule of upcoming events and register today you

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 119,611

Keywords: churchfront, worship leader training, worship ministry school, jake gosselin, worship tech training

Id: 5fnZdHCkbEs

Length: 62min 13sec (3733 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021