Videos on Microphone Polar Patterns

ProSound Web had an article that referenced these videos. They show how different polar patterns sound as you travel around a microphone. Fun demonstrations. Play the intro and buttons pop up to take you to the different videos.

Christmas, Christmas Time is Here!

Well it is Christmas time again and it is one of the most challenging ones I have had in my 16 years at DSC. Christmas is on a Sunday! This means we are doing our two Christmas Eve services on Saturday night and then turning around and doing two completely different services Sunday Morning. We see it as a great time to celebrate the birth of our savior and his resurrection from the dead in one weekend. Needless to say that means one mighty big weekend of music. Christmas Eve will be our regular band consisting of bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, percussion and 7 vocals rotating through, plus a string quartet, extra electric guitar, children's choir, twelve person ensemble.  Sunday Christmas Day we will be pairing back to our regular five piece band. Should be great fun and a lot of work. This a rough stage plot for Christmas Eve.

Radial SGI

My previous post showed our isolation cabinets at DSC. I mentioned the Radial SGi. Here is a picture and some quick info on the SGi. This has been a great addition to our gear. It allows us to have electric guitars with the amps off stage isolated away so they can play loud, get that tone and not overwhelm the audience. I highly recommend this product if you have a long way to run signal to your guitar amps. Radial says you can get up to 300 feet with this product. Find out more here http://www.radialeng.com/re-products.htm
 

Electric Guitar Isolation

I just checked back through my archives and did not see any posts showing my guitar amplifier isolation case for our Worship Center Stage.  This is a case we packed on one of our trailers when we were portable. I reworked the inside of the cabinet and added some acoustic foam to help with the Isolation. I am able to put two combo amps in this case. I have a mic input, an input for the Radial SGI guitar interface, power, and a fan for each amp to keep things cool. Right now I have e609's on the amps. Check the photo.

Mic That Piano

Well with Easter coming up and the huge amount of channels we are using i am going to have to get creative with my microphones. i am currently using DPA 4061 stereo pair on the piano. I also love these microphones on violin, which we have two for Easter. I just saw a videonusing a couple Audix SCX25 with lid closed. Well I don't have any 25's so I am going to try out a couple KSM27's and see what happens. Stay tuned for the results.

I Forgot my iPod!

Well I forgot my iPod for our Lord's Supper Service on Wednsday. I thought no problem I will just use my iPad for the preservice music. It after all has the same playlist for just such a time as this. I have an iPod dock I use so the iPod is standing up, the dock makes it an easy connection to the sound board. I also have an iPad dock in my office. I thought that it would be nice to switch the docks out for the night. It was pretty cool looking, the iPad standing next to the sond board. The issue i had isnthat it was way to big. The people behind the sound booth were looking at a giant distraction. So it was cool but also the big D. DISTRACTING! Exactly what we don't want to be in the tech area. Lesson learned, we need to find a better spot if we use the iPad in the sou d booth.

Audio Terminology For The New Church Sound Guy

A Post from Behind the Mixer that will be useful for new Church Sound Guys.

Chris Huff Writes :

Audio Terminology For The New Church Sound Guy

03.23.2011 : By Chris

"The [audio] info I read or hear is too geeked out for me to understand," wrote a commenter on another audio web site.  The longer any of us work in this field, the more we sling around the technical words as easily as rubber bands.  With that in mind, I pulled together a short list of the more commonplace terms that many of us use.
In no particular order, though with a slightly major bias towards an alphabetical listing...

Auxiliary (Commonly used phrases: "aux sends" and "aux returns")
Auxiliary is simply the idea of "in addition to."  Therefore, a piece of auxiliary equipment is not a primary piece of equipment like a mixer or an amp but is instead something like a reverb unit or a compressor.  The phrases "aux send" and "aux return" are usually used in reference to the audio signal of a particular channel.

Read the Rest Here:

Soft Patching on the M7

Here is a page out of the Yamaha M7 manual that shows how to soft patch the M7.

Where are the Stage inputs?

Our next training installment shows where our stage inputs are located on the DSC stage. We have access to 40 channels on the deck itself basically in the four corners of the stage. What you don't see is a 56 input 12 out panel back stage right. It also has four neutrik connections for passive wedges.

Setup Training/ Input Sheet

This is a jpg of the input list I use here at Desert Springs Church. You can click on it to get a closer look. It is pretty straight forward. The purple section shows what channel on the console each microphone/DI will show up on. It moves on through what source, model of microphone/DI, Mute group assignment, DCA assignment, what stage input the source is plugged into, which channel on the aviom or which Aux send it is grouped to before being assigned an Aviom Channel, and finally which record slot/channel it is sent to.

The Yellow area is for the Matrix section. It shows Matrix number, what it is sending signal to and what output the Matrix is sent to. The turquoise blue section is the Aux section and shows the same information as the Matrix section. The Green section just tells what kind of stage props we need like stools. The redish area at the end just tells you the Aviom inputs. When I fill this section out it fills out my Aviom input template that I print out so the band knows what input is what.

Set up Training/Sound System

I am starting a series setup procedures here at DSC that will help you see how I go about my week getting ready for Sunday services. I want to start off with my input sheet that I put together every week, but realized it makes no sense if I don't explain the gear we have in our sound system so you can follow all the little columns on the spreadsheet. Here is the gear:
FOH:
Console: Yamaha M7CL-48
Cardslot 1: Aviom 16/0-Y1, used to send signal down to the Aviom personal mixers
Cardslot 2: Dante MY16-AUD Card, used for channels 1-16 for multitrack recording
Cardslot 3: Dante MY16-AUD Card, used for channels 17-32 for multitrack recording
40 inputs on stage in four stage boxes
56 inputs backstage, 1st 40 redundant to stage boxes
12 sends backstage for extra monitors/extra subs
4 amplified channels for monitor speakers
8 Aviom outputs in stage boxes

Well next time we will take a look at the input list and see how I try and keep things straight.

Humility and Church Singing

Vitamin Z posted this quote from Bob Kauflin:
“Years ago, I was in England at a large Christian conference. During one seminar, we were led in corporate worship by a guitarist whom I thought was average in every respect. As he finished what I would describe as a sorry time of worship in song, the elderly gentleman to my side turned my way. With a glowing smile, he asked, “That was simply lovely, wasn’t it?” I wanted to say no, but the Holy Spirit caught my tongue before the answer slipped out. What I realized was that only one of us had been worshipping God during that time. And it wasn’t me. I was busy worshipping myself, exulting in my knowledge of worship, my experiences, my training, my background. Needless to say, God wasn’t impressed. ‘But this is the one to whom I will look: he
who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word’ (Isa 66:2b ESV). May God grant us grace to truly seek His reputation above our own each time we meet to worship Him.

- Bob Kauflin, Worship Matters

It is Good to Have Trained Volunteers

Today was an interesting day at DSC. I was called out of service with 2.5 songs left in the music part of our service. I thought, "well I can't leave the Worship Center right now." Well what happens is Trish my trusty volunteer takes over and finishes the service for me. I was able to go handle the situation outside the Worship Center and the service finished with out a problem. Thanks to Trish and her great help over the last few years and especially today. Though it takes patience to train and be trained it is worth time and effort.

Checklists for Service Prep

I came to a conclusion last year reading David Wilcox's blog Undistract. It is a blog that recaps the weekend for his technical team and gives them updates on changes to how or what they do on Sundays. When I first starting reading it I noticed he kept telling his crew make sure you actually do your check list and mark off that you did the items on the checklist. I thought hey checklists what a great idea. I made some up and we started using them and it worked great. At some point we got lazy and did not follow the checklists on Sundays. Well one Sunday we tape some cables and I get asked should we do a line check. I say no we only added one vocal mic since Thursday we are good. Well the mike was patched wrong by yours truly. If we would have done the line check, which is on the checklist by the way, we would have found the problem before the band gets up stage for sound check. We will now always follow our check lists. Here are the checklists we use on Sundays.

Christmas Eve

Well another Christmas season has flown by and what fun and hard work it was. This year had an extra twist with Christmas Eve being on a Friday. This made for a quick turnaround for Sunday Services the day after Christmas. Fortunately Drew had a stripped down version of the Christmas Eve band so we could just take away some elements.

Here is the input list we had for Christmas Eve:
The first column is the channel line up, SI(in brownish orange) column is the input on the stage we plugged the microphones into so you can see the soft patching we did in the console.

Console Input Stage Input


Thanks to all who helped pull off this great weekend.

Barbershop, Show Choir, and a Soundguy

The other night I had the privilege of running sound for the Christmas show of the Duke City Sound, a Barbershop Choir. They sing a capella and usually have a barbershop quartet or two sing with them. They also invite a high school show choir and the 505, which is 25 and under a capella men's chorus, to sing do a few songs. The show is always great but there are some lessons I would love to teach to all the groups involved. Here at DSC we don't exactly take a huge amount of time for sound checks but we always do them. The Duke City Sound always spend a good hour warming up and singing on stage which makes for a great sound check and a great show,but I always have to remind them to do a sound check for the quartets( I will go over how I mic up the choir and the quartets in a later post). The show choir and the 505 never do a sound check. The show choir usually has at least one song with a CD as a backing music track. The choir's timing is off because they can't hear the CD and I have to make adjustments so they can get back on during the performance. If I had a sound check they could have told me whether or not they could hear. The 505 never stays on the Choir risers and ends up out of the sweet spot of the microphones. Both scenarios bring the performance of the choirs down. I can't state it enough, always do a sound check.

Percussion Microphones

With Christmas eve services coming up I thought we should look at what percussion microphones we are using at DSC.

Congas- I use the Shure Beta 56a on congas. They sound good and have a great mounting system.

Djembe- I use two microphones on the djembe. On top I use the Beta 98a H/C it mounts easy is small and it sounds good. Underneath I use an Audio Technica Pro25ax. It can handle the low end. If we are not using the Audix D-4 on the Thunder Tom I will use it on the bottom.

Cajone- I use the above mentioned Beta 56a. Gives good attack for snare sound and a tight low end punch.

Overhead- The Shure SM81 is the microphone of choice here. It is a classic.

Washboard- Christmas Eve will be the first time I have had a washboard on stage at DSC. I am using the Audio Technica Pro35. It makes sound like a washboard. Enough said

Bass Guitar

Here at DSC we don't use bass amps so I don't use a mic on the cabinet. Our regular set up is:
The bass goes into a Peterson pedal strobe tuner and then into a Tech 21 SansAmp bass driver DI which simulates a bass cabinet.

For our recording I used a the SansAmp setup with a Audix D6 on an Ampeg SVT Rig. This is a great combo if you are not worried about stage volume like we usually are at DSC.

Guitars: Electric and Acoustic

Well guitars are next here on our microphone list.
Acoustic Guitar- Now I don't use a microphone for FOH but I do have a microphone as a back up and for Drew's ears.
KSM109-I can get a useful guitar if we have an issue with the pickup in the guitar. I don't like this because I get way to much of the drums in the microphone.

Taylor K-4 Equalizer and preamp - We use this on Drew's acoustic. In my opinion it is the only way the Taylor expression system sounds good. With like butter without like sour milk. Okay maybe not that bad but I do miss the Fishman Pickups in the Taylor Guitars.

Radial Pro DI- I use this on most acoustic. It is my favorite passive direct box. It gives me a nice even tone on acoustic guitars.

Countryman Type85 DI- It is just a classic. I like the type85 if I need to strengthen a signal or I want a little brighter tone. Great DI in the right situations.

The electric guitar I rotate through different styles and types of microphones. First thing to note is I isolate the guitar amps (Fender HotRods 4x10, 2x12) off stage in an isolation box. I use the Radial SGI Studio Guitar Interface to extend the guitar signal to the IsoBox. I will post more on this later.

Current Setup:
Shure KSM27- (replaced with the SM27) I like the way the KSM series sounds. This mic gives nice reproduction of the guitars tone.

For our live recording I used the KSM 27 with a Sennheiser 609 (replaced with the e606).

SM57- This is always a safe choice.

KSM32- I like this mic as well. I just prefer them on overheads.

Next Bass.

Piano, Strings, Flutes, and Horns.

Well as we continue through the mic drawers we now come to some of the more difficult instruments to mic up.

1st the Piano- Right now I am using a single DPA 4061 though I will use a second one if the piano is the only instrument. These DPA's sound good on a lot of instruments so I keep breaking up the set to get me happy sounds on more instruments.

Cello- I just used the above mentioned 4061 and it was AWESOME. This mic is great on violin as well so I will use the Audio Technica ATM 350 on the Cello when violin is used.

Violin/Viola- DPA4061 as mentioned before but I have limited numbers of the DPA's so I use the the Audio Technica pro35 which surprisingly sounds great on strings and is pretty inexpensive.

Flute- Again my first choice would be the DPA4061 mounted with a Countryman flute mount. Since flutes are usually used when we have other instruments that use the 4061's I go to the Audio Technica pro35. It is a little bit but sounds good and works with the Countryman flute mount.

Horns- I use Beta 98's and Pro35's again. I have a good number of 35's because I got them on sale. Both sound good and are easy to mount to the bell of the horn.

Next I will talk Guitars!