Hi Guys,
I am looking for opinions and hope that you guys have one...
Because of COVID our church with two locations is holding services from one location now. The bigger location however does have some acoustic challenges and this location hasn't had a seriously thought out setup for livestreaming.
I have been asked to help them redesign there mixer so the livestream will be better.
In the old situation a fairly simple post-fader mix is sent to the livestream. The individual EQ's are set up for the FOH and because of the acoustic challenge in the room there are some frequencies cut to a level it sounds bad on the stream. Furthermore they need several buses for the monitoring of the bands.
My plan is to advise them to buy a Rack mixer for the monitoring and therefore creating more free buses.
After that I would rearrange the mixer so that I have 12 buses available for subgroups. Every group has channels which are roughly the same (vocals on 1, keys on another, guitars, drums etc etc). The groups will then make the balance and are sent to different matrices as needed (stream, overflow room, induction loop etc). The balance for the stream will be made by the subgroups and the balance between the seperate signals will come from the FOH mix.
The EQ's on the channel will be setup for the stream and possible acoustic challenges will be dealt with by a EQ on the main levels.
The other option is to make a pre-fader stereo bus that is used for the stream. But then I would need two engineers to mix the seperate mixes. I think the mix can be better this way, but not always is it possible to have 2 engineers.
A regular post-fader mix has the problem that some signals have to be cut to such a level that I can't repair that in a postfader bus, without messing up one or the other. So mixing the FOH and having those mix changes be present in the stream gives a lot of challenges, because of the acoustics in the room.
What would you guys do in this situation?
And do you have any extra tips to make this work as good as it can get?
