When teaching video production, I use two exercises to stress the oft-overlooked importance of audio. Watch a movie with no sound, and note how hard it is to engage. Then listen to a movie with your eyes closed, and note how the experience is still compelling.
The value of audio is even greater when it comes to the live streaming of church services. In fact, audio is the most important part of your church's live stream--hands down. What follows are five tips for making your stream's audio the best it can be.
1) Get into a different head space
To give your live stream audio the treatment it deserves, you have to change the way you think about your sound. Your streaming audience is completely different from your live audience. Different location, different playback system, different rules. Only the source material is the same.
Even a small, remote room with a pair of $200 studio monitors will set you up for success.
Many decisions made for the live audience will not translate well to your streaming audience. Set up your live stream monitoring, mixing and processing system so you can make decisions independent of the house mix. You'll often need to undo decisions made by the front of house engineer. Make the mental break--you're preparing audio for two different audiences.
2) Get into a different physical space
You can't make changes to your streaming audio while listening to the sound in the room. You have to have your own space, with your own monitoring (even just headphones). Why? The live sound is being mixed to compensate for the sound system, stage volume and the room itself. Your streaming audience experiences none of those. Latency (delay) is also an inevitable part of streaming, making it impossible to make sense of live and streamed audio at the same time.
Your live sound engineer may supplement the sanctuary's sound with some reverb, but it likely won't be enough.
Even a small, remote room with a pair of $200 studio monitors will set you up for success. If you can't devote a room to your streaming audio, you'll still need to get out of the sanctuary to monitor your live feed. If you can't do that, you'll have to make general adjustments to a recorded service (or virtual soundcheck) and leave the streamed audio on autopilot. Not optimal.
3) Mind the acoustic space
We've all heard how dreadful, sterile and dry a board mix can be. Don't subject your streaming audience to something so unflattering and unengaging. Instead, build an acoustic space around your streamed mix. Your live sound engineer may supplement the sanctuary's sound with some reverb, but it likely won't be enough. In acoustically challenging rooms (as most are), there may be no added reverb at all.
Drums are often too quiet in the mix.
If your mixing setup isn't sophisticated enough to allow you to add your own effects independent of the house mix, just use the room to your advantage. One or two room mics mixed in for the live stream will restore the sense of space, and will also pick up the energy of the congregation during the music (lower or mute these mics for the sermon). The mics can be placed on-stage and pointed toward the congregation, in the back corners of the room, or even at the mix position. If your musicians use in-ear monitoring, they may already have ambient mics that you can use.
If you're starting from scratch, good news: you don't need anything fancy. Even that dusty old dynamic mic from the closet, plugged into the mixer and pointed toward the ceiling will dramatically improve the ambience and "realness" of your audio stream.
Pop in some cheap earbuds, or connect to a USB speaker. Adjust accordingly.
4) Learn your mixer
If you're using a digital mixer, odds are it has a number of features that you can use to improve your streamed audio. For ultimate flexibility, you may be able to create a complete custom mix from your streaming room with a tablet. That may be too much for you or your hardware, so perhaps you can run your audio stream off a post-fader send with "offsets" to compensate for anomalies in the room. Similarly, you may be able to set up and adjust a matrix mix on-the-fly.
Still using an analog mixer? Try sending subgroups (drums, instruments, vocalists, pastor) to a smaller mixer to balance those elements for the live feed and add effects as needed. Drums especially benefit from this, as they're often too quiet in the mix. Even simpler, use a post-fader send to follow the main mix plus those offsets to compensate for the room.
You probably have more control over your audio stream than you realize, so use it. Your goal is to find that spot on the complex-to-simple continuum that works for your equipment and personnel.
5) Master your sound
In the recording world, a mastering engineer makes broad-strokes changes to the music to correct problems, make it louder and add that last bit of polish. Your audio stream could use the same treatment. At the final stage before your audio hits the streaming service, drop two crucial plug-ins into the signal path: an EQ and a brick-wall limiter (in that order).
An EQ can help you correct for problems in the sanctuary. Subs too loud? The mix will lack low bass, which you can fix with the EQ. PA too bright? The mix will sound dull, flat. Restore some sparkle. Are half of your PA's midrange drivers blown? The mix may sound honky and low-fi. With monitors or headphones you can trust, use EQ to make those broad fixes.
Finally, a brick-wall limiter will "fill the meters" and optimize your levels. It will also protect against peaks that could cause distortion or other problems. Set your output level to -0.5 dB or so, and set your input threshold so the loudest signal generates a few dB of gain reduction. Note that plug-ins, especially multi-band limiters, can add quite a bit of latency. Enable all your plug-ins, then dial in your delays to sync up your audio and video.
Bonus tip
Consider all the ways your audience will view your live stream, and listen to your mix on all of them. Turn down your studio monitors and listen on your phone for a few minutes. Watch the stream on your laptop. Pop in some cheap earbuds, or connect to a USB speaker. Adjust accordingly.
Do all you can to make your live stream audio the best it can be. Your audience will appreciate it.
