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Old 03-31-2012, 03:40 PM   #2164
Razor
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Beaverton, Oregon
Posts: 98
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Wow, thank you Yep for the wealth of information here.

I'm the "recording guy" at my church. I make sure all of the podcasts of our services get up on our website and make sure they sound as good as they can.

We started recording with Cakewalk SONAR a few years ago. The live sound engineers would record the services, then one of the associate Pastors who is also one of our musicians did the editing and uploading of the podcasts.

Eventually he taught me how to edit the recordings and I showed the other sound engineers the process.

Unfortunately in the early days, none of us really had a good understanding of gain structure. So sometimes there would be audible distortion in the recordings caused by the mic preamps in the FOH board overloading, other times the signal would be so quiet that it took quite a bit of added gain during the mixing stage to get the recording to a reasonable level.

Eventually we moved the recording PC to a separate room and I took over all the recording for the church. Over the years I've come to understand proper gain structure, how to use compression and limiting, etc.

Now the recordings are much more consistent. They're all mixed to the same level, there are nice fade ins and fade outs, and the volume is consistent throughout each recording.

The only problem I still face is that I have no control over the source most of the time. If I'm manning the recording PC and someone else is running the FOH board...I can only hope that they set the gain properly. I had to sit down and talk to one of our other sound guys about not ever setting the gain setting above a certain point. When our Pastor is preaching, his gain knob is not to be raised above -10 while recording, or this is a possibility of clipping. Thankfully, the other guy has kept that up and I haven't had distortion in recordings for a long time now.

If we were to ever record the whole band though...he'd need to change the way he mixes. I see clip lights flash on the board when he mixes all the time. It's really frustrating trying to get people to understand proper gain structure. He's a good guy, and when he mixes, it sounds good, but he doesn't realize that in a digital system, that clipping just isn't acceptable.

Anyway, rant over. Thanks again, Yep.
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