Rez Audio Production

http://www.churchtecharts.org/Blog/archives/406

In the main sanctuary here at Rez we use VCA’s to control groups of instrumentation. As a result I often field the question, “What’s the difference between VCA’s and Groups?” Well, here’s a nice post over at Church Tech Arts that will shed some light on that for you. Check it out! http://www.churchtecharts.org/Blog/archives/403

When I first started mixing FOH at Rez, one of the core differences between my mixes and the previous guys was a lot more sub range activity. Essentially just kick and bass guitar, and occasionally some synth to put energy in the room during those “waiting” moments that Pastor Tom always used to do. It was cool to add a little vibration to the room during those times.

Then we moved from the Allen & Heath gl4000 to the Digidesign VENUE system. I really felt like I lost a bit of the impact and punch of the low end (my only legitimate criticism of the venue system). But with the right plugins, namely Cranesong Phoenix, I was able to get that punch back.

But right around that time, I was asked to keep the bass quieter. I was a bit puzzled because I didn’t feel like it was necessarily louder than it had been. I even remember a specific service that actually helped spark the debate, and I truly didn’t feel like the bass was particularly loud. So of course, I kept the bass back a bit over the next few months. I was a little dissatisfied because the mix sounded a little too flat and thin.

Fast forward to this Friday. We had a service and the RCS High School team led worship. It was a tricky mix and in the end it came together ok. But the subs were sounding really “woooooshy” and rather unpleasant. Aggressive might even be the right word, if you can fathom the 40hz-80hz range to be aggressive. I was expecting to hear some distinctive punch from the kick, and some movement from the bass guitar… but I didn’t really hear any of that. It was just a wash of muddy low end.It seemed almost constant, rather than pumping.

I started high passing quite drastically all over the console, searching for the culprit signal. I couldn’t really seem to find it though. The subs just would not tighten up. So I just trimmed as much sub range as I could to try and keep space for kick and bass. But they didn’t sound great.

So yesterday I came in, fired up a session in PT and started running the session with only the subs on. I was sending single channels out LR and hearing their impact on the subs. I was stunned to hear that any channel that was not hi-passed up to about 300+ was quite audible in the subwoofers. Ok… yeah… I knew there would be some bleed from neighboring frequencies… but 300hz?

So a few cables and some patchbay work quickly got my Aux feed for the subs running. Immediately the punch was restored.

I’ve always favored aux fed subs, but after the last install, we just fed them LR with the intent of fixing them later. Well, later ended up being many months later, and I’m kicking myself for it now.

It’s now clear to me that when I had my subs LR and I introduced Cranesong Phoenix “Luster” on my master buss, it introduced quite a bit of extra sub range noise. I have been running it pretty hot on the master buss because … well… it sounds great. But it adds quite a bit of low end all over, really pushing lots of extra channels into the subs, and overloading them with lots of woooooosh!

The moral of the story? I don’t know? How about… Feed your subs from an aux.

A few weeks ago I had my most successful choir sound I’ve ever had in the main sanctuary at Rez. I took a few notes on some of my tactics and thought I would share them with you.

The most difficult mixes for me are always those which feature choir. Not only is it difficult to get enough gain before feedback from the choir, but the choir mics tend to feature more drums than choir. It’s always a struggle, but I do have some tips that might help you, should you end up in a difficult choir micing situation.

Aside from doing your best to isolate the choir from the rest of the band and carefully adjusting the problematic frequencies, the next best tactic for me is accurately gating the choir. It’s tricky because, as I said, there are more drums in the choir mics than choir. So how can you trigger your gates off of the choir material rather than drums? The best way I have found to do so is by keying your choir gates off of a limited frequency range. Lately I have been using the 1khz-5khz range. Of course, the most accurate way to choose your key frequencies is by running a bit of analyzation on the choir mics, and taking note of where they tend to be heavy from drum noise or other stage noise as well where the voices are tending to hit your mics the hardest. Then you will have the most accurate gating you are likely to get.

Another tip is to listen to all of your choir mics and determine which one has the most isolation, and the most prominent voices. You can key your other choir mics off of that particular mic, for more accurate gating. Now, if you have the tools to combine both of the previous techniques, you can really enhance your choir sound.

Along with the proper keys, you also need the proper settings on your gate, so ensure that your attack time is very fast and your release and decay times are very slow. I also like to give the gate a range of around 15db or so.

Now the question is, what’s the big deal about gating your choir? Why not just turn them off when you don’t need them? Well, let’s consider the two problems we pointed out with choir:
1 Feedback
2 Bleed of other instruments into the choir mics

Gating the mics properly addresses both of these issues. For me, I can almost never get my choir mics loud enough without gating them. So having enough gain before feedback is a real problem. But if we consider that feedback is something that develops over time, from a loop of sound into the mics, than it stands to reason that if we can cut that loop off before it develops into audible feedback, we can get a bit more volume from our mics. So if you can get your gates to close between every few lines, you can effectively have more volume from your mics.

The gates solution to problem 2 is a little more self explanatory. If the choir ain’t singing, and your mics are closed, your mix sounds better. Simple enough.

I seem to be outsourcing things a lot as of late. Here’s an excellent post from Church Tech Arts discussing how to raise your credibility score as an audio engineer. Some very good thoughts here…

http://www.churchtecharts.org/Blog/archives/253
http://www.churchtecharts.org/Blog/archives/254

So many of you will be visiting this blog for the first time today. So let me start by saying welcome! I’m glad you made it. I’d like to encourage you to bookmark this blog and attempt to check it every now and then. I hope that it can be a place to spark some ideas and conversations about church audio. Hopefully it will be about the technical stuff, the spiritual stuff, the servant-hood stuff, and so on.

This blog is relatively new, so the content is a bit sparse at the moment. To start with, you might want to take a look at this post concerning the Digidesign Venue system, which is what we run in our main sanctuary: http://www.rez.org/wordpress/?p=4

You’ll also noticed the entry below on post-production. The second post-production mix should be on the web this Thursday at the Rez site, so you can check that out soon as well.

In the meantime, I would really like to encourage you to to leave some comments, submit your input, email me any interesting articles you might find online, or even submit a topic you would like to see covered on this blog in the future.

Oh yeah… and don’t forget the WAM meeting on August 21st at 6:30pm. That’s when the real fun starts.

First off, let me say that the following topic is what I would classify as an advanced audio discussion. So be warned that it’s gonna be a little difficult to grasp for the intermediate audio tech… and that’s fine. Don’t sweat it! If you’re not intimidated yet, read on.

I’d like to draw your attention to some great posts over at Dave Stagl’s blog which pertain to an issue I have been working on lately. Rather than attempting to articulate this issue, I will let Dave introduce you to it, as he explains it quite well. We will be working on this at Rez in the upcoming months, so now is a good time to get an introduction to the concept.

http://www.diveproductions.com/goingto11/?p=111
http://www.diveproductions.com/goingto11/?p=113

You can open the following file with the D-show standalone software, referenced in a previous. Simply download the following file and drop it in My Documents\D-Show\User Data\Shows, and you will be able to load it from the D-show software filing tab.

Click here to download the show file.

If you have been to Rez lately, you probably realize that Worship and Praise is taking over. As a result, it’s difficult to bank on having enough preaching content for our TV show and website. So what did we do? Bought a license to publish our worship services.

So this weeks edition is the very first TV program and video featuring our Worship and Praise. This also means that we have to spend some time remixing the services to suit our TV and web viewers. That means more work, but it also means more fun! Keep your eyes peeled for some post production content on this blog in the future.

Thanks to Donovan Jones for helping mix this session. Go ahead and check it out over at the main Rez site.

http://www.rez.org/content/view/802/165/

D-Show Software:
Standalone D-show Software

Here it is… the key to learning the VENUE system. Well, sort of. It goes a long ways towards helping! Download the D-Show Standalone Software available from the above page. This is the same software that is run by the console and is the exact same thing you see on the monitor in the sound booth at Rez. Soon I will make the Default Rez Show build available for you to download and check out on your computer at home.
VENUE Documentation:
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=3&

The documents of special note here are the D-Show Profile Guide, and the A-Net Output card guide. Take a look through these if you have time.