In part 1 I talked about the basic routing setup you need to do basic pitch correction using a digital console, a Dante audio network, and Ableton. At the end of that post, I warned against simply tuning to a chromatic scale, which can lead to tuning “misses” that easily make your vocals sound worse than they did without pitch correction. In part 2, I’m going to show you how we use MIDI clips in Ableton to automatically set the tuning key for our tuning plugin for each song, making… Read More
As the main technical/production guy for a relatively small church, a lot of what I do has to do with squeezing every ounce of capability out of the little bit of gear we can afford, and I know I’m not the only one! Today, I wanted to share with you our simple live pitch correction setup we’ve begun using for our vocals during our sets. Integrating this into our existing setup cost us a total of $49.99 (the sale price for Waves Tune Real-Time). Like us, a lot of churches… Read More
About a year ago I released gldMix: a simple iPhone app that allowed you to remotely mix on an Allen & Heath GLD series console. You can save and recall presets for your main mix, effects bus, or and mono or stereo auxillary bus. The app is really designed for worship teams or bands that use a GLD series console, but either can’t afford ME-1 or ME-500 units or prefer to mix from an auxiliary bus but want to give remote access to the mix. gldMix is a relatively inexpensive… Read More
As Craig Groeschel says, innovation is often borne out of limitations, and as many of you know as volunteer audio/video techs for a small church: limitations abound. Hopefully, that has led you to find creative ways to stretch every dollar and squeeze every ounce of capability out of each piece of valuable equipment you have.This blog post is about how we use Audinate Dante ($29.99 per computer, plus a device that can function as a master clock) and Audio Hijack ($59) to allow a single early 2009 Mac Pro to… Read More
About four months ago I began this series on digitally mixing modern worship with a post about getting started with the GLD-80. I thought it was time for a short post on how “life with the GLD-80” has been over the last few months, so here goes:# Volunteer Friendliness Unless you’re working for a “mega-church” you probably don’t have staffed audio engineers. Neither do we. When considering a new console, friendliness to volunteer audio engineers is really important. I’m not always able to be the one behind the desk, so… Read More
As I mentioned in part one, my church just moved from an analog rig based around the ML4000 to a GLD-80. I’ve been really impressed with the whole system so far, but one of the most “revolutionary” aspects was Dante audio networking. 1. What is Dante Anyway? If you’re more comfortable in the old analog world then think about it this way: Dante is like having a bunch of 64×64 mixers all patched together. Each mixer has (up to) 64 inputs and 64 outputs. You can hook a cable from… Read More
I’ve been mixing worship at various churches for about a decade now. I started on the Soundcraft Series 200SR, mixed on Mackie for a while, upgraded to the Allen & Heath ML4000 (love that beast), got my hands on the PreSonus StudioLive for a bit and now my current church is moving fully into the digital world with the Allen & Heath GLD-80.I’m going to be writing a series of posts covering our recent migration to the world of digital audio. I’m going to be talking a lot about how… Read More
Occasionally I get the chance to play some music. One of my favourite gigs is called June Rocks, a solid rock show put on by a small high school in Massena (Northern New York). Every year the students get to try out for the chance to sing any song they want backed a professional band in front of an audience of about 600. It’s a blast. My setup Every year my drum configuration evolves a little bit, and gets a little bit more digital. Here is what it looked like… Read More
This is part 2 in a series on setting up a system for live digital music production. Part 1 (on hardware) can be found here.## My Goal For me, the goal of my synth setup is to have an easy to use, stable and easily controllable synth and loops rig. Often times I’m not the one playing keys (I’m typically behind the skins), so I need my setup to be easily learnable. I don’t want to have to reach for my trackpad to mouse around and tweak settings in Ableton… Read More
Over the last decade and a half I’ve had ~~a crap-ton~~ quite a bit of experience with music production, both live and in the studio. I thought I’d spend a few posts sharing a few of the interesting things I’ve learned, hoping it’ll be of some use to somebody else and that I’ll get to hear from the pro’s out there who do it way better!### Me Music production began for me when my parents let me put a drum set in their living room in around 2000 (when I… Read More