Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

We had a really well-attended church service for Easter yesterday. Since we want to compile an album of our music to give to visitors, etc. I was asked to record the service. Here’s how it went:

We have a 32-channel Mackie board for the church. I’d guess that in total we use about 20 channels. For the music side of things, we have the following inputs:

a) ~7 vocal mics - There’s the worship leader, 5 vocalists and the pastor who also sings.
b) Percussion mic - used to mic up things like congas and assorted other percussive elements.
c) An electric bass.
d) An acoustic guitar.
e) An electric guitar.
f) An electric piano that we send two channels from in order to layer sounds to stereo mains.

If you add that up, it’s 13 channels of stuff. What I haven’t mentioned are the drums. Ordinarily we don’t mic the drum set (which I play) because they’re plenty loud for the room. However, we wanted to record all the music, so it meant mic’ing them up. To my mind, for a 5-piece kit, you want no less than 5 mics:

1. Overhead for cymbals and ambient drum pick-up.
2. Kick drum mic.
3. Floor tom mic.
4. Snare mic.
5. A mic for both mounted toms. I prefer one for each but we’re talking minmums here.

Given that I have 16 channels and I was using 13, and I wanted to use 5 mics for the drums…I was out of channels. So, we compromised. I ran all the drum mics into a front-of-house mixer (a Behringer UB1622-FX PRO 8-channel desk) and mixed that to a (sort-of) stereo pair into the recording rig. Not ideal, but workable. I tried to give some sense of space to the placement of the various mics, but the proof will be in the final product. We’ll see.

“So”, you might ask, “What did you use the last input for, since you only used 2 of your remaining 3 channels?”. Thanks for asking. I used that final input for a “house” mic that recorded room ambience. We want the recording to have a live feel to it and I was afraid that it would sound somewhat sterile without having room sound mixed in. I’ve done that in the past for a coffeehouse and it works nicely.

Our Mackie board at the church does NOT have 16 spare sends that we can use to route all these inputs to the recording setup. The answer in this case was to run nearly all of the inputs first to the recording interface and then back out to the board. So, all the mics, instruments, etc. were first run to the inputs of my Motu gear and then sent back to the board via each channel’s associated output. All the inputs went through the Motu gear and Digital Performer routing. It worked out great. Setting it up was a nightmare, since it took us 7+ hours to make it all work. I’m glad we did it and I learned some things in the process.

Now comes the fun part. Mixing, editing, printing. I’m looking forward to it!