10 Ways To Improve Your Mixes

1. Invite people to give you unfiltered comments on your mix over the next few months.
2. Record your mixes or rehearsals and go back and listen to them. I just use the CD recorder we use for sermons.
3. EQ in a way that fools the listener into thinking there are no speakers, only the band.
4. Serve more- if you only practiced a musical instrument once a month you'd be rubbish, same with the sound board.
5. Serve less- if you work every week you need to get away and gain perspective by distancing yourself and not over-analyzing everthing that makes sound.
6. Listen to a broader range of music. Not just christian music.
7. Use more mics- try to get one tone with one mic and another with a different mic and blend the two.
8. Use less mics- possibly the best drum tone I've gotten came from a pair of carefully placed overhead mics and a kick mic. Sometimes simplicity is best.
9. In mic placement, 6 inches is a mile. Find the sweet spot for every instrument and document that spot.
10. Work with the musicians to lower the volume of the stage.

My Favorite Audio Websites

Audio Thru: I just discovered this website a few weeks ago but it really is a cool site that offers lots of cool info on audio geekyness for everyone across the spectrum knowledge-wise.

Microphone Data: Imagine a database that has almost every microphone ever made, listing the tech specs, allowing for comparisons, what each mic is used for, how much it costs advanced searching criterion. This is that site.

Unidentified Sound Object: I love film sound and abstract sound. For some reason when I need to think creatively I come back here.

AES: Yes I am an AES member. I love reading geeky stuff, I want to build my own electronics. And short of college-level physics and electronics text books this is about as techy as it comes.

What cool audio website do you use? Use the comment section to start a conversation.

Troubleshooting 101

It's rehearsal night, you are almost finished setting up before the band gets started with uhm, rehearsing. And you find that one of the channels is not working. What do you do? It was working last time we used it so what do you do?

1. Always start backwards: go from the microphone back towards the inputs in the stage box/ mixer. Rarely will a microphone just up and decide to stop working. It might be a bad cable or that you have a PAD on the channel it's being fed into. In the case of DI's, in my experience don't bother with the active DI's. Yes, they do sound just a little better, but is it noticible? No, and you have to get batteries, or feed them phantom power, and almost every model I've tried has gone wrong somewhere along the way. And they're more expensive than passive DI's. Keep things simple. Passive DI's with just a fat transformer inside has no tiny integrated circuits to go wrong.

2. Chances are it IS the mic cable: I can't tell you how many times we've had a problem isolated the problem down to a mic cable and then after testing it with a multimeter, the problem went away. Why is this? It's probably because the solder connection on the cable is intermittent, so when you twist or bend it the connection opens and closes. So what will appear to not work one moment will, the next. Time to get out the soldering iron.

3. Know Thy Equipment: You should know what microphones you have at your disposal, what the manufacturer recommends it to be used on and even Google (or Bing) what other people have found to be great applications for that mic. I've forgotten to feed phantom power to microphones that needed it and wondered what went wrong. The same with active DI's I've used balanced TRS cables on a guitar and wondered why it didn't work.

4. Use the Process of Elimination: Draw up a system diagram from the stage box where you plug in mic cables to the mixer to the amps and processors to the speakers. Then memorize it. If you know where the problems can't be you can easily determine where they must be.

5. Two Heads Are Better Than One: Get someone to help you figure out the problem. Trust me, it works.

Ministry Essentials

Being successful at anything is not just about doing something great and excelling at it, but it's also not letting yourself get burdened by the temptation of trying to do everything great. A great case study for this is In-N-Out Burger. They do one, maybe 2 things, but they do it so well they can't be bothered to put other things on the menu.

Today I closed my Hotmail account. It felt quite liberating, actually.

I do all my e-stuff through Google, it's just easier for how my brain is wired to navigate and it's only going to get better when Google Wave comes later this year. But the reason I closed my hotmail account was because I don't do much with it. Do I use it? Yeah, but do I get value out of it? Erm, no. So the question becomes, why keep it around? And "just because" isn't a good enough reason anymore. Information without application is just noise.

I want to throw out a challenge to you guys to find something to stop doing something in your area of ministry that is not adding real value. If it's just taking up time, taking up space, taking up budget or other resources, and you don't think it's helping you guys do ministry, get rid of it.

Father's Day: Be There… or Don't

Last Father's Day we did a spin-off of the Letterman show called Church For Dudes. It's worth a watch. So, like many bands that have to live it up in the difficult second album, we are going to attempt the impossible: Fathers Day, one better. I'll be attempting to keep it from sounding like poo, although last year wasn't too bad. Here's a look at what's coming up this year:

If you're in SoCal and want to have a fun Father's Day that doesn't feel churchy at all, come to Sunridge, and if you get AARP emails, you might want to bring earplugs. And if you come, please stop by the sound booth and say "hi" I'd like to see y'all.

5 Things Every Sound Booth Should Have

1. Lots of Sharpies or Pens- You don't have to floss your teeth but you should take production notes.
2. Masking Tape- There are times when it's good to mark everything, including fader levels on the fader strip like this picture here.
3. Headphones- you need the ability to monitor things in isolation.
4. Can of Compressed Air- Electronics accrue entropy in the form of dust. And most electronics, digital too, don't like dust. So you should have some minimal form of preventative maintenance to keep things running.
5. Some Humor

Think anything else should be added to the list?? Use the comment section...

Reverb Units Part 1

We use effects probably every Sunday, but we perhaps don't really know what they are or what makes them different. And why are there so many different types of reverbs? There's plate verbs, spring verbs, halls. Surely they must all be the same thing.

If only.

Spring Reverbs: A spring verb uses a small speaker at one end of a spring and a pickup at the other end of the spring. This is the standard found in most guitar amps that have a built in reverb feature. And like you'd expect, they're very good at adding ambience to guitars.

Plate Reverb: A plate reverb uses a piece of sheet metal that is vibrated by a speaker that is picked up abain by something like a single coil pickup. Not that you'll ever find one that's actually analogue. All reverbs this day are digital. I love a gentle plate reverb on the snare drum.

Chambers and Halls: Chamber and hall reverbs emulate putting a speaker in a room with a microphone capturing the resonances and reverberations of a room or concert hall. In the 1970s many recording engineers would put a loudspeaker in the bathroom with a microphone on the far side of the room because the floors and walls being tiled have a great slapback sound.

Convolution Reverbs: Convolution reverbs take an impulse response of the room or concert hall and uses a digital algorithm like all other digital reberb units. The problem with convolution reverbs are that when are you going to want to use the Sydney Opera Hall for a reverb during worship? They're quite expensive and not easy to edit.