Take your Church's Livestream Mix to the Next Level at ANY Budget 

Reaper and Studio One are also good DAWs to try.

Your video is very timely I have a meeting with the Trustees tomorrow. Thanks for the advice.

Great video. Got a question though. I'm the sound tech at my church. We have a concert array and I mix from an Allen & Heath SQ7. I've been mixing for years but my livestream experience is basically..."here it is...it's yours". We're taking baby steps at the church and things are improving but the livestream quality is lacking as far as the audio goes. I have 5 remotely operated cameras and have a dedicated aux send for the livestream so the FOH and live stream mix are separate and I have full control of all 32 channels for both. When the praise team comes up to sing and play, bass, 2 guitars, keys and digital drums and sometimes up to 8 vocals the audio portion of the livestream goes into compression and then slowly backs out of it. When the pastor uses his lavalier mic it's nice and clear with some ambience because I have one and sometimes 2 room mics for ambient room noise. The company that installed the system told us we don't need an encoder because we stream right to RU-vid through RU-vid Studio. Any thoughts on the reason for the compression? Would an encoder help? You mentioned OBS. The church is thinking about super imposing hymn lyrics to the live stream so people at home can follow along since the face masks make some of the vocals a little muffled. How much prep time is involved? We usually have 2 hymns at this point and 2 performances of the praise team and it sounds like a lot of transcribing. Thanks in advance guys.

I’m a little surprised that these gentlemen talk about mixing in a DAW and paid VST plugins so much. Most DAWs come with a bunch of plugins that to this video’s target audience should be everything they need and more. But I find live mixing in a DAW less than ideal because you’re never gonna be as fast as on a board with actual faders, knobs and buttons (unless you’re a pro gamer I suppose). Of course in an ideal world you’d be able to create completely separate mixes for the room and for streaming, but using the same EQ and compression settings for both can work. Now if you create a stereo bus which goes out to the stream, you have the freedom to give the stream exactly the amount of reverb it needs while not changing anything for the room. Also you could run the channels post fader OR have someone mix volume levels on something like an iPad (most digital mixers will let you do that). But spending money on VST plugins, in my opinion, is not the best way to spend your budget.