In contrast, I just purchased a used digital console for my recording studio. The console, which is one of the best available today, had been briefly used by a church, but their audio team was not comfortable with the new technology.
Therefore, they removed the digital console and re-installed a more traditional analog console.
While this is purely speculative, the church may not have had proper training on the digital console and, therefore, didn’t achieve a level of comfort and confidence in its use.
Record To High-Quality, Easy-to-Edit Medium
In order to obtain a quality recording of your church service, make sure you’re recording to a high-quality and easy-to-edit medium.
It’s safe to say that the majority of recording today is in the digital realm. However, for reasons of convenience, our church records the service audio to both analog and digital mediums.
While cassette tapes will most likely go the way of other past recordable mediums, many people still use them in portable players or even in their automobiles.
Therefore, we always make a cassette master tape of our church service and make duplicate copies the same day.
Even though cassette recording is inexpensive and convenient, it falls far short in providing high-quality audio. For that reason, we also record to both a CD and a digital multi-track recorder.
From the CD master, we can make CD copies for anyone interested, and the digital multi-tracked audio gives our team the ability to remix the audio for our television and radio broadcasts.
Also, it’s easier to edit audio recorded to a digital format. If something in the audio needs to be fixed, we simply digitize the audio into a digital audio workstation (DAW) such as Pro Tools, and the audio is represented graphically on the computer screen.
Editing is accomplished easily when you’re able to reference the audio visually as well as aurally.
Master The Stereo Mix
If your church has the capabilities, always master the stereo-mixed audio.
One of my favorite pieces of audio equipment is my mastering unit. By simply including it in the audio chain, the final audio quality is taken to another level sonically.