Digital Setup For A Church

C

crimp

New member
I am doing research for my church on a small computer based recording setup and would like to ask you guys some questions if I may.

1. What suggestions would you have in the Mac vs. PC arena. I would be operating this setup and I have recording experience with Cool Edit and Cakewalk on a PC in a home studio hobby setup, but I have never used a Mac before. Would a PC suffice for recording a church service in up to to 2 hour segments. Or would I be better off going with a Mac.

2. Any suggestions on computer specs, hard drive, memory, processors etc.

3. We have a small mixing board and I plan on using it to mix certain things, but I would like to be able to seperate out 4 to 8 channels for mixing later. Would a firewire or usb setup suffice and would anyone have suggestions for brand, specs etc.

4. Does anyone have any experience in this type of recording enviroment and could you give me some pointers or a heads up on what I could expect.

I will be recording church services and editing them to CDs which will be available in our audio library. These will also be edited for radio play. I appreciate any help or suggestions you could give me.
Thanks
Greg Thomas
 
crimp said:
1. What suggestions would you have in the Mac vs. PC arena. I would be operating this setup and I have recording experience with Cool Edit and Cakewalk on a PC in a home studio hobby setup, but I have never used a Mac before. Would a PC suffice for recording a church service in up to to 2 hour segments. Or would I be better off going with a Mac.
Click to expand...

Go with the devil you know! If you have to troubleshoot, you will be much more comfortable doing it on a PC. The PC setup is also likely to be less expensive and that might be a consideration depending on what you have for a budget. The length of the segment recorded shouldn't affect your brand choice. Just focus on getting a drive large enough to handle that much recorded material.
 
definitely get a solid soundcard/interface. i always had problems with my computers soundcard when i was using that. if i tried recording anything longer than 10 minutes it would just go nuts. the other day i recorded over 2 hours through adat lightpipe while monitoring it through the interface and there wasn't a single problem.
 
Miking in a worship environment is challenging. While the possiblity is there (with a flexible congregation) to have numerous location mics to pic up the various elements of the service, I'd use the aux sends on the live board to two-track digital. Since most sends are pre-fader you can have the live mix untouched and a totally seperate mix for your recording. You could try some omni outriggers hung from a balcony or directed figure 8's from the sides of the sanctuary, but to get an optimum sound it requires freedom that you just won't have in a live worship setting. To get the choir, organ, ministers, instrumentalists, band, piano etc. it would require numerous microphones and positioning that would appear obtrusive to the congregation. I use VST compresion, and reverb on my raw data and master @ 256K .mp3. The only problem is that I'm the choral director so a lot of times my settings get changed midstream as observed in this recording. The four choir mics (hanging EV cardioids) pick up the choir well but someone took channel 7 down early in the service so there was nothing I could do with the piano accompaniment (the obvious drawback). If you have hands on the whole service this is something you could avoid.

Check out "How Beautiful"

http://www.nowhereradio.com/artists/album.php?aid=4633&alid=1352
 
Thanks for your replies guys. I meant to add that my budget for this is $3000. My setup will not be as sophisticated as yours 219777 but I will be aware of your suggestion of who is running the boards. Basically, we will have a choir mic, piano mic, organ mic, lapelle(spelling?) mic, and a congregational mic. Our auditorium has no balconies or anything like that. Basically 1 level with 15' ceilings. Approximately 50' X 100'.
 
I do that at my church, here is what we use.

Alesis HD24 for tracking. Dump from Alesis HD24 to my home studio or church computer into Sonar/Samplitude via Alesis Fireport. Mixdown ITB via Tascam FW1884 to wavelab for mastering.

Here is what you should purchase -

Alesis HD24 $1500 (used 1k)
Tascam US2400 $1200 (used 1k)
Cakewalk Sonar $400
Wavelab $400 (I think)

You can get a Dell 8400 2.8mhz new from ebay for $600 with flat monitor that will run that with no problem.

I also do alor of live recording for other churches and the Alesis HD24 is rock solid and does what should without crashing.
 
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