For those of us who are church creatives and responsible for the preparation of the recording environment, we always do our very best to ensure that the audio that is captured is of the highest quality.
Everything from sound proofing, acoustic treatments, and more. However, what do we do when the weather forces us out of our traditional recording space and into our homes?
Needless to say, that is a true game changer. While most of us have the equipment to do a recording, guaranteeing the outcome of the quality of that audio is dicey at best.
Preparing your recording environment, believe it or not, actually includes you preparing the outside of your home as well. Little did I realize this until we were totally caught off our guard with two back-to-back winter storms.
Wind is an amazing culprit of producing sounds that normally our natural ears do not hear until we bring the audio into post-production editing. Then everything that you wouldn’t want to hear becomes so readily available.
What was our culprit? Windchimes that adorn our back porch and windows that allowed for them to sing in their full glory while trying to product our worship service from home.
We were caught totally off guard and proceeded to the very best of our ability.
Needless to say, look for anything that has the potential for creating unwanted sounds in your environment that you may not want to have heard in the audio after post production.
Wind chimes will be at the very top of our list. In addition, animals are the next item to contend with. How many of you have cats that remain invisible all day long until you want to do something that requires them to be out of the picture. Then, poof, just like magic they are right in the middle of your scene.
Another thing to consider is all of the other electronic devices that each of us have in our homes. Things like secondary cellphones or landlines, tablets, or any other object that has the possibility of creating unwanted noises during your recording session. It’s always a great idea to silence all of your devices before going into a live recording event.
While not everyone has a sophisticated recording environment within their homes, there are certainly some affordable tools that you can acquire to help eliminate unwanted background noises and condition your audio to make the post-production process a little smoother.
My first recommendation would be to acquire a BluYeti microphone. Another would be a USB line processor. Both of these can be acquired from The Guitar Center or other audio stores. Being USB capable ensures that you will be able to use them with your computer to offer a pre-processing of the audio to create crisp and clean audio.
You can certainly bet those will become a part of our household in the immediate near future to ensure that we have them at our disposal when we have to deliver a worship service from home.
Most home recording environments usually are going to involve a wood table or desk of some sort. We all know that our pastors love to have their study tools their with them. Whether that be their Bible’s, tablets, or possibly notebooks.
That’s great. However, encourage them not to be picking them up and setting them back down without caution creates an influx of air movement and usually a banging sound that is nearly impossible to remove from the sound mix.
Furthermore, encourage them to do any recording prior to eating any meals. Whether we realize it or not, our mouths and stomachs make very precarious noises after we eat, most of which spill out unannounced and very awkward times. Guess what just got captured into your audio. Sure they are easy to edit out if they happened between words, however, when the noise is a part of a word, there just isn’t any good method to change that up.
With many of us having endured these two winter storms having to do things differently, we would love to know how you got around having to improvise the way you recorded your audio and video to deliver to your congregation.
Let us know. We’d love to hear how you handled it.
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