Digital Recording
Today’s digital recording products
present many opportunities for enhancing
the worship experience. Most importantly,
they can be employed easily and efficiently
alongside the worship schedule. Whether
it’s a simple direct-to-CD recording
– immediately distributed to
the congregation for spiritual edification
during the busy week – or spreading
the worship message to shut-ins or
the infirmed, a CD-quality recording
will assure the clearest and cleanest
audio quality. When making multiple
digital CD copies, the audio quality
stays absolutely perfect unlike the
audio degradation of analog cassette
copying. Once the worship message
has been captured digitally, it can
also be uploaded to a worship website
for online distribution, downloading
or archiving.
For many churches, recording the
praise music or sermon consists
of connecting a recorder (often
a cassette deck) directly to the
mixing board and pressing REC and
PLAY. Simple enough but basically
still a compromise.
Here’s the challenge, musicians
/ singers that are quiet on the
stage are loud in the PA and subsequently
too loud on any ‘mixing board’
recordings. Conversely, things that
are louder (i.e. Acoustic drums,
guitar amps, bagpipes etc…)
don’t need to be turned up
in the PA but are very quiet on
recordings. By placing a few microphones
in the sanctuary, along with a direct
feed from the mixing board, you
get the best balance of both loud
and quiet audio sources. Using multi-track
recording further allows for independent
track volumes to be adjusted at
mixdown. Moreover, tracks can be
edited before mixing and additional
digital processing, like reverb,
can be added for more realism. Finally
the entire mixdown can be ‘mastered’
to add the final professional polish.
As digital technology is integrated
into today’s worship services,
many churches are discovering cost
effective solutions to a host of
challenges. From acoustic analysis
of the sanctuary and instant recall
of an entire mixer setup to complete
multi-track recording and ‘drag
and drop’ editing and CD production,
all of this is possible from a single
dedicated system that doesn’t
need a professional audio engineer’s
expertise. Just a little time investment
and practice can yield truly professional
results.
