This series of articles is now located at www.thechurchpod.com. Switch your bookmarks accordingly and thanks for reading!
I’ve described different ways for generating a mix for live streaming in previous posts, but this is a decently powerful one if you don’t have the luxury of a second console or DAW. It won’t make much sense, though, unless you’ve gone through the other articles and have a good idea how the signal flow works.
Let’s go back and start with the approach where you use an aux send to create an independent mix. On a digital console, select an available send so that the main faders are now controlling aux send levels (flipping the faders). On each channel you want included in the stream, turn up that fader and balance everything while listening to that aux output bus. Want reverb? Turn on a reverb setting on the aux output itself.
I went through all of this in part 2 of this series. It works pretty well, but has limitations. The good parts: once you set a relative fader balance, any normal mixing for the main room will tweak these accordingly (as long as each channel send is set to post-fader). Muting main channels also mutes for the sends. This is helpful in that you don’t have to baby-sit both the room and aux mixes constantly.
The bad parts: You can only have one reverb/effect on the mix, so it affects everything. A big deal? Sure, because you want more verb on vocals when they’re singing, less when talking, and it’d be nice to tweak this further for your pastor mics. There is no fader or pot to adjust this on the fly. So, try this:
Using a console matrix to generate a far better stream mix
In addition to your main mix and aux outputs, most digital consoles feature matrix outputs. These can be referred to as a mix of your mixes, meaning any of your buses (main mix, aux sends, sub-groups) can be blended to a common bus output. Here’s a simple setup:
Create an aux mix of your band and vocal channels like we described before, but without the reverb turned on at the aux output.
Use a second aux send and turn on a hall reverb (or whatever) on this aux bus output.
Turn up individual channel aux faders to add instruments and vocals to this reverb as desired. This is ONLY to add reverb to your sources, not the main band mix.
Use a third aux send for your talkie channels.
A fourth aux send is for your talkie reverb; put a very short, small reverb on this aux bus and use sparingly. You want space for the pastor so it doesn’t sound completely dry and weird, but not much reverb as it gets too difficult to understand what they are saying.
Assign all these aux buses to a matrix output. Now you’ve got the musicians, vocalists, and talkies with customized reverb settings all blended at this separate output. Use the aux bus master faders/pots to balance between all of the individual aux groups.
Assign this matrix output to a physical output and plug that into your live stream interface (or route via Dante). Once you get the idea behind this, you can customize and go deeper for more control. For example, you might want a different reverb for your musicians, separate from what you put on the singers; use another aux send for those parts. Or you could split out parts of the band, such as drums, guitars, etc into individual auxes.
The reason for the separate reverb auxes is so you can fine-tune how much reverb is added to each instrument or vocal.
Another thing I do is use an aux send to create a separate subgroup for vocals; this gives me another “set” of singers, and I then compress this aux bus pretty hard and blend it in so it thickens the vocalists. You get the idea…maybe. Sit down with your console, watch the Yamaha TF matrix videos (couple of minutes) to get the concept, and see what you can figure out.
Want to help your team learn more about running sound for your services? Mixing for God is designed specifically for volunteers to help understand procedures, terminology, and how to build a quality mix.