How to Lead a Sound Check for Worship

Find this post helpful and want to further equip your church with excellent sound volunteers, check out our Mixing for Worship Course. This course provides the best strategies for live sound reinforcement, advanced mix engineering, and getting the most out of your mixing console.

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Before building anything, a solid foundation is always the first step.

Without a strong foundation, anything built will cause many problems. But get the foundation right, and the thing that is built will stand strong no matter what is thrown at it. 

A sound check is the act of setting the foundation for your church’s entire audio situation on a Sunday. Every church should have this down for the glory of God and the excellence of its worship. 

What is a Sound Check?

The most basic way to explain a sound check is this: it is a time to set solid gain structure and apply EQ and compression to each channel of audio. The idea is to have each singer or musician individually sing or play in order to specifically construct their sound to be pleasing to the ear using EQ and compression. 

With proper gain, EQ, and compression in place, the musicians can freely adjust their in-ear monitors, and the sound engineer can adjust other mixer parameters with no worries. 

What a Sound Check is NOT

Soundcheck is not the time to set up the soundboard scene. In other words, it is not a time to get things done that could have been done before the band, preacher, and others arrive. A proper sound check should also not take a long time.

It should be swift, efficient, and pleasant to work through. Consider how completing all the proper legwork ahead of time (like setting the scene, ensuring the routing is correct, etc.) will serve the team and the musicians. Think of ways you can value the time of all those involved. That way, when the musicians arrive, their time (and your own) is stewarded wisely and efficiently. And ultimately, this will provide a more locked-in worship service for your church.

Sound Check Heart Check

A sound check is so much more than just processing audio signals. Because the sound check is the first stage of preparation for everyone in the room on a Sunday, it is a time to set the tone for the entire team and for the entire day. This is the big moment where everything comes together and all the preparation the sound engineer has invested will pay off. 

1. Be prepared to receive the band physically, mentally, and spiritually. 

How can a sound engineer be prepared physically? Have the soundboard set up and all the routing done ahead of time. Again, this is wise stewardship of time that shows all involved that their time is valued. Also, be sure to arrive early. That way, everything is on and ready, and you are in the right mental headspace to receive everyone else with joy and low stress.

Mentally, know what's going to happen during the service (or throughout the entire day if there are multiple events). Know who is on the team for a given Sunday. Know their names and know their roles. 

Spiritually, be eager to lead your church in worship, and see your role as vital in making that happen. Maybe even take time to pray for the job, the team, and the service leaders, and that humility and excellence will be present. 

2. The audio engineer is the leader in this moment

Most leading on a Sunday is done by the teaching pastor or worship leader. Or if a church has a production team, a video director is leading. But in the moment of a sound check, the audio volunteer is the leader. Everyone is looking to him or her to know what to do next. So, this is a time of great stewardship and leadership. 

Also keep in mind that the tone of the day is set here, and we’re not talking about the audio tone. The attitude a sound check leader brings will inevitably affect all those he or she is interacting with. Enter the morning grumpy and tired, and imagine how this will impact others. But come in gentile, loving, respectful, and excited, and the results will be obvious. 

Interact with others. Tell them you’re excited to see what the Lord’s going to do through them today. Ask them about their family. After a sound check, tell the musicians how great they sounded and that you’re looking forward to the service. Be others-oriented. 

Again, this is not just a sound check. It is setting the tone for the day. 

So the heart is set, and the big picture is understood. How does a good sound check actually work, and what are some tips to make it even better? 

How to Actually Do It

Again, a sound check is setting the gain structure, EQ, and compression of each channel individually to lay a foundation for the audio engineer to work with during rehearsal and the services itself. For obvious reasons, this post won’t dive into how to set proper gain structure or EQ, but we have good news for you.

We can fully equip you and your audio team to set gain structure, EQ, and compression like a pro. We can also equip you even far beyond this with skills needed to be an all-around proficient and excellent audio volunteer for your church. This is done through Churchfront’s Worship Ministry School. Here, we pour all our best efforts into equipping churches for excellent worship ministries.

Generally, it’s best to begin the sound check by starting with the worship leader microphone. This way, the audio volunteer can know what’s happening on the stage and can hear from the leader first and quickly. From here, the sound check can go in really any order, working channel to channel, setting gain, compression, EQ, etc. with each channel.

Remember the importance of asking each instrument to play at their loudest. If a vocalist is timid and feels awkward at this so early in a morning, ask a stronger vocalist to sing along with them or maybe one musician to play along with them. 

That’s the general idea of a sound check itself! But remember, what makes a sound check effective is everything else this post has talked about, too. Anyone can conduct an okay sound check. Only healthy leaders who are servants conduct the best sound checks.  

A Few Tips

As we wrap up, here are a few pro-tips for running an effective sound-check.

1. Address people by their names when sound checking

This one might seem obvious, but it can be easy to not address people by their names. It’s easy to say, “Hey, guitarist. Can I have your tone?” or “Hey, singer. Can you start singing?" 

People have names, and this is a very personal and thoughtful way to connect with the band and set the tone for the day.

2. Use the talkback mic

If the tech booth is any distance away from the stage, whoever is leading the sound check will have to raise their voice constantly, and that can send the wrong message. Not only can the sound volunteer save their voice, but using a talkback mic can communicate with the band in a much more thoughtful and peaceful way. 

When starting off a sound check, it can be helpful to make sure everyone can hear the audio volunteer well. Ask everyone to raise their hands if they can hear you, and those who can’t will inevitably look around and wonder why everyone has their hands up. Then that will get the signal across that they need to get their in-ears adjusted so that they’re not left out.

3. Survey the room

Remember that not everyone in the room is sitting at the tech booth. So it is important to step out of the booth and walk around. If the sound console offers an iPad app, mix with the iPad as you walk around the room. 

4. Ensure there’s a clear hand-off to the worship leader

Make sure there's a clear handoff to the worship leader so that everyone knows who is now in charge of directing the musicians and conducting the rest of the rehearsal. 

The sound check is done, and the sound engineer is no longer the leader, so a clear hand off can help transition everyone smoothly and efficiently. 

Find this article helpful? 

How to Setup Vocal Mics | Best Microphone, Gain, EQ, Compression, and Effects

When thinking about leading Worship, there is literally no leading happening without vocalists being heard clearly. Although it may seem the solution is to plug in any old mic and turn up the gain, there is more to it than that. Churches who want to improve their vocal microphone setup should dig into this post and the video above. 

This post is going to provide a walkthrough of Jake’s vocal microphone setup he is using at his church. Here’s the roadmap. 

Hardware

Microphone: Telefunken M80

Mixer: Behringer WING 

How to Process Vocal Mics

Step 1: Gain

Step 2: Low Cut/High Pass Filter

Step 3: EQ

Step 4: Compressor

Step 5: Pitch Fix Plugin

Step 6: Effects (Reverb and Delay)

It’s also worth noting that there are so many great demonstrations of these steps that you can view through the YouTube video above. So, to see any of these steps in action, check out the video. 

Before we begin, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Church Sound online course. It’s a step-by-step guide that’s great for helping new sound techs in a church. We’ll instruct you on the anatomy of a sound system, how all the gear works, microphone types, etc. We also cover the essentials of processing audio so you can understand all the concepts in this post. You and your team will gain instant access through enrolling, and your worship ministry is guaranteed to be improved. 

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Hardware

Vocal Microphones

With a vocal microphone, it’s important to have a handheld dynamic microphone. It could be wireless, but wireless mics will cost more, especially for a quality one. Jake is a fan of good old-fashioned wired mics. For years, he’s been using the Shure SM58 or Beta58.

The Shure mics work well. They're great standard microphones and, when processed correctly, they'll sound great every time. 

But recently Jake wanted to make an upgrade, so that’s when he picked up a Telefunken M80 dynamic microphone. It comes in at around $250, and it's not super expensive like a Neumann condenser microphone. It’s a great middle of the road option that provides a bump in quality while keeping a reasonable cost. 

Behringer WING

Finding the right microphone is important, but if a church doesn’t have a great mixing console to process the audio, then buying a good microphone is pointless. It would be like buying great off-road tires and putting them on a minivan. In order to get the most out of a vocal mic, get a mixing console that can process its audio well. 

That’s where the Behringer WING comes in, which is one of Churchfront’s recommended consoles. For the rest of this post, the audio processing will be done on a WING. 

How to Process  Vocal Mics

Routing the Mic to the Mixer

Once the sound waves from the voice enter the microphone, it goes through an XLR cable straight into the stage box, which is on stage. Jake’s church has an S16 Behringer stage box. The signal from that box goes to the mixing console over AES-50. 

Step 1: Gain

The foundational concern of processing vocal audio is adequate signal coming into the channel on the sound console. Apply too much gain, and there will be too much noise with overcompensation happening in other areas. Too quiet, and there obviously won’t be enough of a signal to work with. 

For vocal mics, a sweet spot is to meter around -12 db. This depends on many factors, but it’s a helpful rule of thumb.

One of those factors that could change the gain setting is mic placement in relation to the PA speakers. Ideally, the mic should be behind the speakers. In Jake’s setup, his microphones are right next to the speakers, which isn’t ideal. He’s able to make up for that gain with digital trim, however.

step 2: Low Cut/High Pass Filter

Adding a low cut or high pass filter (HPF) removes the lower end frequencies of the vocal audio. Jake likes to cut out the low end up to around 290 Hertz. This means that any frequencies under 290 Hz will be cut out, causing the vocal audio to “cut” through the whole mix better. In other words, Jake explains that worship vocals shouldn’t sound like a radio host or Joe Rogan. Removing the low end sounds nice, pleasing, and it makes everyone happy.

For a demonstration, be sure to check out the YouTube video above. 

step 3: Equalizing (EQ)

Equalizing tunes the vocal audio to sound pleasing within the entire frequency spectrum. On any digital sound console, navigate to the EQ settings, and the HPF should already show itself as active. The art of EQing any instrument or voice is one that takes practice and skill. It’s far too big of a feat to explain how to EQ well in this post, so check out Churchfront’s Beginner’s Guide to Church Sound. For those who understand EQ, here’s the snapshot for for how Jake sets up his voice EQ. Jake cut his voice by 6 db at 576 hz, cut 3 db out of 3k hz, and boosted the 10k hz frequency by 1.5 db. 

EQing vocal audio this way gets rid of the low junk, the mid box-y sound, adds some sparkle to it, and takes away the harshness. This is a crucial step.

step 4: Compressor

Now that EQ is done, it’s compressor time. 

In a nutshell, the compressor makes the loud parts quiet and the quiet parts louder. It’s so important to not distract the church with inaudible or over-the-top singing, so compressors eliminate those potential distractions. 

Here’s how Jake compresses his voice. 

The first setting is the ratio. Jake chooses a 5:1 ratio. Next, is the threshold, which is at minus 29 decibels. Next is the makeup gain, which is important because if a voice is being compressed by five decibels, it’s important to make up for that at five decibels to smooth out the sound.

Jake’s attack is set around 10 seconds so that his voice can cut through the mix but not cut through the too much before the compressor comes down. 

It’s best to put the compression after the EQ so that the signal that’s being compressed is the actual and desired EQ-d voice.

Pitch Correction

On consoles like the WING, pitch correction is available as a plugin. This is so much easier than attaching a computer and tuning voices through a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) like Ableton Live. Don’t have a newer console that has this feature included? Be sure to check out Waves’ autotune software and watch our How-To video on how to use it. 

For churches with consoles like the WING, using pitch correction helps eliminate distraction. Don’t think T-Pain in the worship service. These corrections are small and subtle, but when used well, a plugin like this can do wonders for the vocal mix. 

Reverb

Reverb gives voices a sense of space, even in smaller venues where the effect of a larger venue just isn’t possible. In other words, adding a reverb effect helps people feel like they're in a bigger space. It sounds pleasing.

Jake is using a plate reverb with 2.6 of decay and pre-delay at 65 milliseconds. It’s good to have the pre-delay setting a little higher so the reverb doesn’t make the voice muddy. That way, the reverb is kicking in 65 milliseconds later, causing some helpful separation.

Delay

Lastly, delay can be helpful when used sparingly. Too much, and it gets really distracting and frustrating. The best way to enable delay is to have the tap tempo assigned to an assignable button on the console and assign the delay (and reverb, too) to a DCA or custom-assignmable fader so the audio volunteer can simply push up the delay and the voice keeps going. To hear how this works out, check out Jake’s demonstration in the YouTube video above. 

Wrapping Up

This concludes how Jake sets up his vocal mic, and we hope this knowledge can bless your own church’s audio mix and worship ministry, overall. 

Remember to check out Churchfront’s Beginner’s Guide to Church Sound in order to be fully equipped to run a church’s audio well, especially if any of this post was overwhelming or unfamiliar. This is an in-depth course that works through all the fundamentals of mixing audio. Check it out. 

Seven Tips to Improve Your Worship Broadcast Mix

Be sure to check out Churchfront’s Broadcast Mix Mastery online course if you desire a better live stream mix for your church. This is a great course for beginners who are new to mixing in a digital audio workstation like Ableton Live.

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Looking to achieve a professional broadcast mix for your worship ministry? This post will cover strategies that make the most significant improvements in the sound of any worship band, even if a church has a modest budget. 

Here are seven ways to improve the audio mix of any church live stream. 

Before we get going

So much of the proof of this post is packed into the YouTube video above, where Jake walks through each step with helpful in-depth examples, so do not finish this post without watching these tips in action! 

Let's dive in.

Tip #1: Reduce Cymbal Bleed

This first tip has nothing to do with mixing on a console or processing audio. Instead, it has to do with stage volume and getting a clean signal in the first place. One of the biggest challenges of multi-track recording and streaming a worship band is dealing with lots of stage volume. The most common issue is cymbals from the drum set bleeding into vocal microphones. Next time there’s a chance to listen back to a multi-track recording of the worship band, solo the vocal mics and listen for how much cymbals are bleeding into the lead vocals. Often, the high-hat is the worst culprit of all the cymbals. For example, when a vocal mic picks up the cymbals, EQ and compression only make the cymbals more pronounced. The result is that it’s nearly impossible to fix this problem in post-production. 

There are multiple solutions for reducing cymbal bleed. First, tell the drummer to stop hitting the high hat and cymbals so dang hard. That's a way to solve this problem without having to purchase any additional gear. Next, consider purchasing some plexiglass drum baffles or full-on shields. Another option is to implement full drum isolation to completely eliminate the problem of cymbal bleed. 

This problem is so common in small to midsize churches because their stages are so small. Churches with larger stages often get away with no drum shield or baffles because bleed won't be that much of a problem.

Tip #2: Get the Gain Staging Right

Make sure the gain is set up properly on the mixing console or stage box preamps. This is an important principle to follow for any situation, be it a live or broadcast mix. Mixing in a DAW like Ableton Live provides the flexibility to boost or cut gain, but this has no effect on the actual pre-amp. It's merely a digital trend being applied within the DAW. The best rule of thumb is to have gain metering around a -12 on average, and then peaking no higher than -6 decibels. If there’s not enough gain, the result is to crank up the digital gain in Ableton, and that will introduce noise. And if the gain is too high, it's going to clip and distort.

For a demonstration, watch the video above.

Tip #3: Use a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to mix your live stream

Churchfront’s favorite digital audio workstation is Ableton Live. It's cross-platform, CPU-efficient, runs any third-party plugins, and it can also be used for a variety of other purposes in your worship ministry like a keyboard or a tracks rig.

Many churches purchase a second mixing console for their broadcast mix. Do not make that expensive mistake. This route costs way more than mixing in a DAW, and it rarely sounds better. A DAW like Abeleton live can be scaled to the size of any worship ministry, and a DAW never runs out of tracks. Plus, DAWs provide way more processing and plugins to create an amazing mix.

To get up and running with a DAW, it is as easy as grabbing a USB cable, purchasing a DAW like Ableton Live (Pro Tools or Logic are great choices, too), installing that DAW on a computer (which is probably in the tech booth already), and connecting the mixing console to the DAW. From here, the audio volunteer can mix the audio through Ableton and send that final mix to streaming software or a video switcher. This also opens a worship ministry up to multi-track recording, which allows easy mixing in post-production. 

Tip #4: Use Vocal Tuning

For worship leaders in the room: Ever cringe listening back to recordings of yourself leading worship? It's probably because you didn't use live vocal tuning. 

Churchfront’s recommended plugin for this is Waves Tune Real-Time. It's less than $100 for this plugin and you can install it in Ableton Live within minutes. 

Here’s how this plugin works. Drop the plugin on an individual vocal track, and in real time it will make adjustments to the singer’s pitch to ensure their voice is tuned perfectly. Of course, this plugin really only works for bringing vocals that are 97% in tune to 100% in tune. It can’t fix bad singing. Vocalists still need to know what they're doing and they still need to have a good in-ear mix. But even notes that are slightly out of tune will make a church cringe and distract from worship, so this is an easy, helpful step. Vocal tuning can eliminate distraction.

For a demonstration, watch the video above.

Tip #5: Drum Replacement

Of all the instruments, acoustic drums are the hardest to perfectly process for a church’s mix. That's where the drum replacement hack comes in handy. 

The plugin Churchfront recommends is Trigger 2 by Steven Slate. It's another third-party plugin that provides massive value for the price of $149. This plugin removes so much room for error when it comes to dialing in a consistent and pristine drum sound. 

Most worship ministries don't have acoustic kicks that sound amazing on their own, and it's hard to mic and tune these drums. Just use drum replacement. It's going to sound amazing instantly.

For a demonstration, watch the video above.

Tip #6: More Reverb

While reverb can definitely be overdone in a broadcast mix, most people tend to underutilize it. If reverb isn’t used, vocals, drums, or acoustic guitars end up sounding very dry and those listening online has no sense of space. So don't be afraid to apply more reverb than what the church is used to in the live mix. 

Remember that people inside the church building are hearing the natural reverberations of the room. Hence, there’s no need to apply as much verb in a live context. 

For a demonstration, watch the video above.

Tip #7: Compression

Just like reverb, compression can be overdone. But in most cases, church live streams hardly utilize any compression at all. Not using compression causes vocals and other instruments to have a wide dynamic range, resulting in a sound that’s not smooth at all. When singers are quiet, like when they trail off at the end of a phrase, they’re barely heard. And when they sing  loud, their voices overpower everything else. Compression works wonders on vocals.

For a demonstration, watch the video above.

This completes our list of seven tips to enhance worship broadcast mixes. We hope your worship ministry will be served by it! 

Don’t forget to check out Churchfront’s Broadcast Mix Mastery online course. This course is great for absolute beginners who are new to mixing in a DAW like Ableton Live. It's comprehensive and covers every crucial step for getting started.