How to Mix Worship Music for Church Online 

Bro, you’re coming in clutch, during these times, I’ve been a subscriber for a while Thanks!

plug-ins - gain , ( vocal tuning plug in) then eq , compression & effects (reverb and delay ) .. thanks for this intro … you have really simplified these words for me and this whole processing chain

I've learned so much from watching you Jake. I have been a sub for about a year and my FoH is drastically different now that before I stepped in to learn sound at church. With our church entering live-streaming, I had a new challenge and you definitely stepped up on your channel and it has definitely helped our church sound online. Thank you.

I've worked in broadcasting and audio production for (many) years, and am the sound person at church. This video does a GREAT job of explaining the concepts, and how they work. GREAT JOB!

I never knew about mixing and mastering in a DAW. I was just used to a FOH mixing. Being a musician myself, I was never into audio mixing but just playing the instruments. But due to the prevailing situation, I was almost forced to learn it in order to make our recorded worship sound great for RU-vid. I’ve seen at least 50 videos related to it and about 70 hours in the last 2 months mixing and mastering. I feel the difference in the mixing improve week over week and I use quite a number of pro plugins to get it sound even better. From 8 hours of mixing per 25 minute worship to just 2-3 hours now, I’m sure it has been God’s Grace all through 🙌. Thanks Jake, most of your videos have been useful to us 🙌 Love from India.

Thank you for inspiring and helping many churches around the world. I'm from the UK.

To God be the Glory, Thank you Jake for all your help.

A common flaw I hear in many streaming mixes is distortion on the Pastor's mic when they get LOUD. Its important 2 understand the gain relationship between transmitter and receiver. If transmitter mic gain is NOT properly adjusted to the volume characteristics of your Pastor you WILL have distortion. And all the engineering expertise and console processing in the world will NOT fix it as the problem is at the MIC. Spend the time to properly adjust transmitter gain for clean speech/vocals.

I am glad that you started with trims. One of the coolest mixes I ever did was built on gain matching. I was alone and I was new to the venue and new to the talent, and of course the talent was running late - i.e. not much time to ring-out the microphones. So before the audience was going to come in, I raised the levels of the monitors and the PA above the standard level. Then listened to the sound of the first microphone when I stood on the stage and waved the microphone in front of the closest monitor. Then went to the back of the venue and adjusted channel 1's levels. Took a couple of round-trips for channel 1, but things got actually easier as I added each new microphone and did not turn down the already turned-up individual levels. Had to lower the main level and the monitors a couple of times to keep things just below feedback, kept adding microphones and then finally turned the whole system down before the audience came in. Didn't need much FX that night, and my respect of gain trims grew a little bit.

Thanks, Jake for taking us through the basics. Very nicely done.

Another great and timely video Jake, thanks again for continuing to provide this much needed content to the church!

Dude thank you soooo much, our church is growing and we need to start using audio and live-streaming, I was so overwhelmed by the audio part but this video cleaned up so much, thanks you, God bless

Watching this RU-vid from Singapore and thank you so much for letting us know on what is so difference between the audio sound in our Worship Hall & bringing it over the Live Stream 😀. Is a great help & make me understand better now. Thanks alot brother and may God to continue to bless you in the Worship & RU-vid broadcast 🙏

Thanks! This video helped me a lot to understand what I need to study in order to improve our broadcasting. Blessings!

Thank you so much for the master class! I appreciate it very much. Let's look to always do our best for our Lord and Savior. God bless you brother.

Fabulous Jake! Thanks so much for the time taken.....sooo helpful!!!

You're so blessed Jake.

Thank you so much. You won a subscriber! Thank you for working for the Harvest. Hallelujah!!

Thank you for the tips! Cant wait to try this at our church!

Excellent, thanks for this awesome class. Glory to Lord!

YO !!! Happy 100k my bro!!! 💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾

Thanks for the great overview. Really helping me to know how to help shape our Gathering music experience.

This is a really nice overview of the fundamentals. Thanks for making such an informative video.

You are answering my questions .. God sent you are ..

Excellent! I am recording our first service of the summer on Monday. Super excited to knock it out the park.

Sounds awesome man. One if the best subs I've made on RU-vid 👍🏼

Great video, thanks Jake! Can you please go more in depth on the Plugins, like HOW you EQ and how you dial in the compressor, reverb, ... That would be so helpful!

Watched a few of your videos... the visuals are on point. Nice lighting. Nice Grade. Well done

Thank you so much!!! Will definitely share :)

I'm so happy to gain this knowledge.

One of your best, Jake!

Thank you so much, that was amazing 😁.

Thank you for all the great information.

Thanks for the video Jake . It was a great help .

Another helpful video, thank you so much.

Thank you, Bro. Jake.

Wow!!! Amazing! God bless you

Thanks a lot bro. Got a lot of lessons from this session. Thanks again

I have learned so much, thank you so much.

Thank You So Much . For Sharing, really help me out here

Many smaller churches have analog or older consoles that don’t offer an interface built into them. Some are using their phones to stream right now. They’re taking an aux send signal to their phones. It’d be a great idea to do a video on cheap, budget-friendly workflows for churches who don’t have that Bethel money. Most churches don’t have that Bethel money.

We have four mics and a keyboard. They all plug into an old Behringer Europower PMX2000 power mixer, and our live output is through the Right/Mono Main output to a pair of speakers. Our worship music comes from the keyboard and a singer (sometimes two) and the mics are used for reading scripture and teaching. We livestream our services to Facebook through OBS with two cell phone cameras using iVCam through USB connections to a Dell laptop that is running OBS. The audio to OBS is from the 1/4" monitor output jack on the PMX2000 running through a 1/4" to RCA adapter then to a ROXIO VHS to DVD3 PLUS capture device connected to a USB port on the laptop. The video quality is acceptable but the audio is extremely tinny and "flangy" ... So far we've had no complaints about the audio on the live stream but I just hate the way it sounds, so I'm using a second laptop running Audacity (it also runs OpenLP software for projecting song lyrics) and recording into it from the same Monitor Out source on the PMX2000 through a splitter - except in this case there is a 1/8" aux in port on the older HP laptop and I don't need the ROXIO capture device for it. Since the audio sounds so much better from that computer, I use it when I edit and produce the video from the service to upload it to our RU-vid channel in the afternoon. Perhaps my problem is in the ROXIO capture device. But since my Dell laptop doesn't have an aux in port, just a single headphone/mic jack that doesn't recognize audio coming in from the PMX2000. is there another way to get the audio into the computer without having to buy another computer or any gear? Our ministry is small and, well, we don't really have money to spend to make things sound good.

Great stuff. Really appreciate this video.

Thanks for your help man. We’re still in the process of upgrading our Analog PA to Midas M32. I hope everything turns out good

Love the video! Thank you so much! The only question that comes to mind is how would I connect the mixed sound from a laptop to an iPad that runs Switcher Studio?

thank you for this, it has helped alot.

That was really helpful! Thank you!

Very informative, thanks Jake!

Amen brother, very interesting, you're on point, i'm about to try the Logic Pro, many thanks

We need more of these

Enjoyed your content - Thanks for the top tips 👍😁 🙏

Great series, brother. Keep it up.

Amen! Thank you... Awesome👏👏👏

At 23:00 I thought the orange circle in the bottom right corner of the video was paint from my kids. I was mad at first, but then realized it was in the video. Great video!

Great video Jake! Thanks for all your ideas over the last few months. Can you feed audio (DAW) back into wirecast on the same laptop

straight on topic!!!!

Estou amando seus vídeos, muito obrigado!

Great job! Thanks, Bro.

Thank you so much Sir.. Blessed

Pastor at my church, and have found your videos valuable as we pivot to livestream services

Thanks for your time Jake, we wish God bless you! My question is: What´s the best way to send that mixed audio to the OBS or another broadcast software? What would be a nice computer configuration to use the DAW and a broadcast software together? Thanks!

So much good information. Thank you.

Thanks for your presentation..its very helpful..GBU

Just subscribed. Good luck with your way to 100k.

5:45 Amen Brother... * while looking at myself in the mirror...

thank you for the insight

Very nice video. I have been a church musician and operated a recording equipment of my own for many years. Different churches, bands, and even genres of music....and several instruments. I finally “retired” from it. My current church takes highschool or college kids who know absolutely nothing about mixing music, not the first thing, and puts them in the booth mixing. Their training is how to flip it all on and that is it. Worse.... they dont even know what they dont know. No ear for music. I love all of your videos.... but fundamentals go back even further than you took them here. Please keep up the good work. I have shared this video with my pastor and worship pastor. At some level perhaps they will begin to understand at least some of the skill that is requires.

Thanks Jake

Thanks Jake! Excellent video and very useful. I am working alone in the process of producing the worship time pieces for our church and I am currently using Adobe Audition for mixing. I noticed you didn't mention it. Could you tell me if you have used it or if you recommend it? I am fairly new to this and want to make the most of the resources I have available. Thank you

You're amazing!!

Some interesting points at the end, there, about gear and how to accomplish this... and the trump card of “this is how Bethel does it” kinda can’t be beat, LOL, but I’d add a few caveats: 1. You do not need to “spend $50,000” on a second mixing console. That may have been hyperbole, of course, but you can get a Behringer X32 or WING for $2500-$3500... still a lot, of course, but not nearly as much as king-of-the-hill MIDAS. 2. I would imagine that most sound techs would still want a control surface of some sort to mix on, if they are actively mixing for live streaming. Yes, even spending $3500 for a glorified control surface may be overkill, some may want options to accomplish this. At the least, devices like the X-Touch or Faderport could be quite useful, and are far less expensive than even the two Behringer boards I mentioned. Just some food for thought. You generally give great advice here, Jake, and I don’t dispute that. :)

Thank a lot Brother 😊 It was more informative 🎉

I’ve spent around 300 hours remixing our multitrack recordings over the past year, they sound ok now.

This is helpful. More of the live stuff that includes the topic of latency please 😭

Man you blow my mind, I want be like you Good job

Bro pls do a video how do you convert the audio from daw to live streaming sw. and I am not able to get the individual track from my Allen mixer

Thank You!

Cool start! 👍

Hello sr . Thank you for sharing . This will help our church live stream. gobless

Awesome video thank you Jake. Just one thing I disagreed with is the 95% processing, 5% setting mix levels bit. I think mix levels is very crucial to a great mix. You can have a perfectly processed signal, but if its placed too low you may not even hear how great it sounds. One of my pet peeves is hearing live music, seeing say a guitarist play a guitar solo... and you can't even hear it. I think this is where sound techs also being musicians really helps. I know how hard these guys worked on practicing their parts so I try my best to mix so that everyone is heard (appropriately of course). But overall great video, just sent it to my whole team to watch. Thank you and God bless!

thank you jake...

Hey Jake i really like your video, just two qstns. What free software do you recommend using for a church that has a basic sound system setup? Looking forward to your reply. I'd like you to make a video of that if possible!

Amazing

I typically use 2 eqs. One before the comp and one after. The one before, I use to make small cuts to harsh and muddy frequencies. Remember, low frequencies have more energy and can trigger the compression in an undesirable way. I like to clean it up before I compress. Then into compression. The compressor is usually fast attack and slow release. Then eq after to control the tone of the vocal. Lastly, with reverb, I like to get a reverb sound I like then pulling it all the way down in the mix. Turn it up until I can hear it, then back off a tiny bit so it sits in the mix. It will add space and width to the mix. I appreciate you making this video. I’m sure it will help a ton of people. I work at a pretty large setup/teardown church and you have some great content.

Amazing work. You seem to enjoy it!

This is great!

We have a much smaller church and the problem we had was that the ambient sounded nothing like the mixer output as the drums and bass were not running through the house. My solution was a little Behringer mixer and a couple of SM58 mics setup by the main mixer. We output this mixer into the computer to stream via the USB output on the mixer. Is it professional? No, but it sounds pretty well balanced and if you buy new you are looking at a couple hundred for a mixer and a couple hundred in mics and a maybe another hundred for mic holders and cables and all the little stuff that everyone neglects to add in. It was a lot cheaper than trying to add additional channels to pickup the stuff we weren't amplifying.

Have learned so much , thanks for the vedio I have this question ,how can this work using analog console

Awesome job bro GOD BLESS

wowwww so helpfull bro , thanks so much!

Great video Jake. The church world of beginner engineers needs this type of content all the time, I'm no exception. Fundamentals are the key do doing it right, not gear. That being said, I don't know that I totally agree with the DAW as being the "right" way. I think it is "a" way. But just like you said in the beginning, gear is not the determining factor, its knowing how to use the gear. Mixing on two consoles can sound just as good if not better than a DAW and the reverse can be true. Comes down to what your techs can use better. I know for me, most of my techs are a little more advanced in age and a little overwhelmed by technology. Putting them in front of a computer over physical buttons/nobs/faders will almost always result is failure. Not their fault, just how their brain works best. Anyways. I love your content and really appreciate your work. Keep it up!

Man ! You are the best ! I have a question is it possible to route the mixing console someway with Ableton for live mixing ? You know, use the sends of the console to Ableton and then return the signal with the Dsp to the console for FOH? I hope this makes sense . Greetings from mexico !

Nice to find this kind of stuff finally. I'm a pastors kid and guitar player at our church I have a home studio and would like to do this for us thanks for the vid

This is great Thank you brother. One question. How to output your mix on DAW to the streamer like wirecast, vmix or obs?

Many Thanks

Thanks very much

Informative. Thanks!

Thanks!

Thank you

One question. For live streaming, can you use the same computer for livestream and mix the audio in Daw or protool?