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Join Church Production Magazine as we delve into the world of church technology and media ministry, featuring in-depth conversations with church tech experts about the latest in lighting, audio, video, staging, streaming, and content creation, and how they wrap it all together to create meaningful worship experiences. Discover how they leverage cutting-edge technology to enhance regular services, produce impactful sermon bumpers, and create both short and feature-length films. Whether you're a seasoned tech professional or new to the field, gain valuable insights and tips to elevate your church’s production quality, help your church expand its reach, and communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Joseph Cottle (00:06):
You are listening to the church production podcast from church production.com. I'm your host, Joseph Coddle, and today we are with Caden Van Dorn. Caden is our production tech here at Life Mission Church, where I work and serve. He is essentially our resident audio expert, and what we're talking about today is what he's done with our live stream mix. I've been so happy with how it's been sounding the last couple months. And the truth of the matter is it's a set and forget mix, and I know a lot of churches out there are in the same situation. You're running your live stream audio mix off of an ox mix from your board. It's set and forget. Caden has really made ours sound incredible and I want him to just share some tips and he really does. He gets into the weeds on this. This is going to be a great nerdy episode for any of you who want to nerd out about your livestream audio. We're so thankful for Caden. Let's listen in to the conversation. Caden, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for
Caden Van Dorn (01:09):
Having me.
Joseph Cottle (01:10):
I'm so excited to do this. Honestly, me too. When I asked Brian, I was like, man, I really hope Brian says yes because you're my friend.
Caden Van Dorn (01:20):
What is male friendship in the 21st century except for doing a podcast? Podcast together,
Joseph Cottle (01:25):
Dude, so true. You got to do a podcast together. This
Caden Van Dorn (01:30):
Is no wait. This is how we know we're official now.
Joseph Cottle (01:32):
Yeah, gross. We'll shake on it. Pros, we've only been working together for almost two years. Yeah. Oh God, it has been almost two years. It's
Caden Van Dorn (01:40):
February.
Joseph Cottle (01:43):
So Caden's origin story, I'll let you tell
Caden Van Dorn (01:46):
It story.
Joseph Cottle (01:47):
I'll let you tell it. Sure. Tell us where you're from, Caden, how did you end up in the green room at Life Mission Church, recording a podcast with
Caden Van Dorn (01:54):
Me. Okay. Wow. So all started when I was born, a little place called Manhattan, Kansas, little apple.
Joseph Cottle (02:02):
The little apple,
Caden Van Dorn (02:03):
Little apple. I always have to make that distinction. No, even people from Kansas, I have to make that distinction. It's pretty funny. But anyways, born and raised there. Let's see, how do I cut this so I can keep it at a reasonable length? So I was born and raised in a Christian family, went to a Christian school, a private Christian school. In sixth or seventh grade, my Spanish teacher recognized that I had a technical mind, and so she started getting me involved with our chapel, which is a very small system that just needed a small four channel analog board coming into some small speakers. And so got started in tech doing that. And then from there she got me involved with the church that we both went to. I got plugged into the tech team there and ended up serving there for six or seven years just as a volunteer, but very regular every Sunday type of deal. And now is that the church you came from to hear? Yes.
Joseph Cottle (03:12):
We'll give him a shout out. What's the name of the church?
Caden Van Dorn (03:14):
That would be University? Christian Church. Shout out Harold Pittman, my old td.
Joseph Cottle (03:21):
Hopefully he's a reader and a listener of the mag in the podcast.
Caden Van Dorn (03:24):
What isn't everybody,
Joseph Cottle (03:25):
Doesn't everybody listen? Well, we actually have to my knowledge, a sizable following. Exciting. But maybe shoot him a text. Be like, Hey,
Caden Van Dorn (03:37):
Hey, if you're not listening to the podcast, what are you doing?
Joseph Cottle (03:39):
Yeah, tell him you
Caden Van Dorn (03:41):
Not listening to
Joseph Cottle (03:41):
This guess. Tell 'em you made it. Tell 'em you've made it. You've
Caden Van Dorn (03:43):
Arrived. I've made it. This is it. This is my big break.
Joseph Cottle (03:47):
You're at the top.
Caden Van Dorn (03:48):
But anyways, continuing in the story. Volunteered there for six or seven years, worked for a summer camp as their sound engineer and sound engineer is kind of an all encompassing title. I was really everything technician. I was the fixer.
Joseph Cottle (04:01):
Very common.
Caden Van Dorn (04:02):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure many of the people listening can relate to that story. But did that for three years, developed more skills, was in IT school, just at a community college in Manhattan. But I didn't end up finishing that degree. I ended up dropping out of the first year due to some circumstances within the school that were just with the administration and with my teachers. Nothing super dramatic. They just had personal issues that didn't allow them to teach as well or at all. But from there I was looking for internships and actually surprise, none of those internships worked out. And so I thought, hey, what if not internship but full-time job, which sounded
Joseph Cottle (04:58):
Crazy to me. Maybe I could get paid instead
Caden Van Dorn (04:59):
Of maybe I could be paid instead of paying to do your internship. Yeah. Crazy. But then I applied to Life Mission Church to work under the one and only Joseph Coddle and it was love at first sight.
Joseph Cottle (05:17):
We did like you immediately. We gave you an offer pretty soon after that, right?
Caden Van Dorn (05:22):
Yeah, yeah. From that interview to me actually starting was still like a month and a half.
Joseph Cottle (05:29):
Yeah, it was around Christmas, right?
Caden Van Dorn (05:30):
It was,
Joseph Cottle (05:31):
Yeah.
Caden Van Dorn (05:32):
Yeah. I remember I got the offer call while I was in the parking lot of a grocery store doing an Instacart run.
Joseph Cottle (05:40):
You're always doing that stuff. You still do that stuff.
Caden Van Dorn (05:43):
Not as often anymore. No. You haven't been lately. No. I'm venturing into other areas that are more within the technical world and serving the
Joseph Cottle (05:50):
Church. That's true. You just started doing
Caden Van Dorn (05:52):
Some That was my full-time job before I worked here. I was Uber Eats driving up to military base and what you're getting your groceries.
Joseph Cottle (06:03):
The other thing you're talking about, the other side hustle and shout out to you because you've started helping out other local churches here asking a small fee, but it's working out and they love your help and I'm so excited for you, man. There's a ton of churches here in Kansas City that need help and your expertise is fantastic, which is why we actually have you on the podcast today. And so what I want to talk to you about was what you've done with our livestream audio because it sounds quite good. A discerning ear would be able to tell that it is a set and forget
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Mix.
Joseph Cottle (06:38):
But for a set and forget mix, I'm giving it a plus. It's quite good. I'm sure you'd give it like a b plus because you're endlessly critical of yourself. You always want to do better.
Caden Van Dorn (06:50):
So
Joseph Cottle (06:50):
I don't think you'll ever give yourself more than a B plus on anything in your life.
Caden Van Dorn (06:54):
Okay. Yeah, it's still growing, but I am very happy with one where it was versus where it is now. There has been a very, very market improvement
Joseph Cottle (07:06):
Now. We had a big hardware change last summer. We switched from the Digitco, was it S 21?
Caden Van Dorn (07:13):
Yes.
Joseph Cottle (07:14):
We had a DiGiCo S 21 that was sort of reaching end of life. It was about eight years
Caden Van Dorn (07:18):
Old,
Joseph Cottle (07:19):
So we switched it out for an Allen Heath D Live. Yes, the big boy. We got the big one. The big wide one. Takes up our whole desk. It's lovely. It's glorious. Yes. And do you think that switch helped a lot?
Caden Van Dorn (07:37):
So funnily enough, whenever I'm running live sound in the auditorium now, it just clicks less than the S 21 and we have a full outboard wave set up. So I've actually experienced more challenges in terms of our front of house engineering. But that's just a personal note. But as far as live streams, no, I don't think the console has made that big of a difference because I'm not really doing much on board processing. All of the processing on the live stream is being done outboard through waves.
Joseph Cottle (08:11):
So for our live stream you are running really the only processing you're doing outside of processing that Russell's already done as far as E and that is everything and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Yeah,
Joseph Cottle (08:25):
Yeah. So it is a bit of a team effort because we're getting Russell's mix.
Caden Van Dorn (08:31):
Yeah. Sorry, I should have clarified that. We're
Joseph Cottle (08:32):
Getting Russell's processing. We're getting Russell's dynamics. We're getting Russell's compression. We're getting Russell's eq and he is a master at eq. That guy has our room so dialed.
Caden Van Dorn (08:45):
Yeah,
Joseph Cottle (08:45):
His mixes are so clean.
Caden Van Dorn (08:47):
Yeah,
Joseph Cottle (08:49):
So we're getting that. And then what I really love though about our mix for the live stream is it sounds very live, doesn't sound, sometimes those mixes can sound so dry and that's what makes 'em pretty meh and is a dead giveaway that it's a set. It's a set. Forget mix's just not good. So how are you using the little bit of processing after what Russell's doing? How are you using that to create that live feel?
Caden Van Dorn (09:27):
Okay, so what this actually comes down to that live feel, the difference between a studio album, let's just take this to an album away from livestream or to a post produced album. You can tell when something is live there because one, not everything is perfect. Well, depending on what you listen to, not everything is perfectly tight all the time and there's that natural organic feel to everything. But also you can hear the room and that translates very well to giving the feel of this is live when you're listening to something on Spotify. And so we have two sets of room mics that we're balancing. Two literally just a $40 stereo pair of those beringer condenser mics. Don't know
Joseph Cottle (10:21):
What they're called. Those little stubby ones we bought
Caden Van Dorn (10:22):
Last year there workhorses. But we just have those and they're not even hung anywhere. We have tiny little mic stands and we've just planted them at the front of the stage just on either side, love it. One right next to the drum cage one on the other side of the stage. And that helps. They contribute a very bright sound. And we also have two shotgun mics that are up near our main pa, but firing down more at the crowd. And those funny story
Joseph Cottle (10:50):
About those we didn't know we had those
Caden Van Dorn (10:53):
For
Joseph Cottle (10:53):
A long time.
Caden Van Dorn (10:54):
They just kind of
Joseph Cottle (10:54):
Appeared. And then we were up moving light fixtures earlier this year and we look up, we're on this big extended boom together and then we're like, holy crap, somebody put shotgun mics up here. We had no
Caden Van Dorn (11:11):
Idea. These have just been here the whole time for
Joseph Cottle (11:14):
Years. Just
Caden Van Dorn (11:15):
Been chilling.
Joseph Cottle (11:15):
We didn't know. And just for context,
(11:18):
I took over as a VL director about four years ago. Before that I was just leading worship here and at our campuses and we didn't have an AV L director and our worship pastor was the kind of defacto AAV L director and it was just really burning him out. And any of the AV L directors before me, it was always more of a part-time situation. Nobody took notes, nobody left me any information about anything that was going on in this pretty big room. I mean, we can seat a thousand people comfortably in this room. This is not a small auditorium and we have this huge PA and nobody left me notes of anything. So we're still discovering little bits and pieces of things. Our KCK campus,
Caden Van Dorn (12:06):
A treasure trove, it is ridiculous stuff we find there.
Joseph Cottle (12:10):
Again, we started that campus right after I came here from Michigan five years ago. And basically we just threw in all the stuff that we had been using at our mobile campus that was defunct. We tried it for a couple years, it didn't work. That was even before my time. So when we added the KCK campus, we merged with an existing church that was up there. We did a remodel in the sanctuary. And other than that, we bought a new PA and a new console. Other than that, we just reused everything from that mobile campus and they just kind of threw it all in the closet downstairs and we're still finding
Caden Van Dorn (12:52):
Stuff. I think I was talking to our music director for KCA, he found an N 64 a Nintendo N 64. This is not AV L related.
Joseph Cottle (13:02):
We were just rummaging around the basement. You were there. He saw this N 64 that's been sitting in the basement for god knows how long, but it was just in a Walmart bag and it had six or seven original cartridges. I thought he was going to poop his pants. He was so excited. Oh my gosh, he was so excited. Anyway, we got off track there. Room mics. We're talking about room mics.
Caden Van Dorn (13:24):
Yeah. Wow. We really were. But yeah, so two cheap beringer mics on the bottom, two shotgun mics at the top. And those, since they're so close to the pa, they contribute. They bring a very mids forward sound. And so those mics contribute a lot of weight to the feel of the live stream. Whereas those bottom mics are one cheap condenser mics. So no matter where you put them, positioning is less important than mic choice. In this particular scenario. They sound very bright and especially being right next to the drum cage, you get a lot of symbol bleed too, which could be a blessing and a curse depending on how you look at it. Even through our,
Joseph Cottle (14:14):
We have not even a cage, we have an enclosure, a full plexiglass enclosure and we still get symbol bleed.
Caden Van Dorn (14:21):
Well yeah. And it doesn't help that we're, that's going to happen and the mic is literally three feet away from it. So it's definitely going to happen. But in our case, it's not terrible. So we're not super worried about it. But those mics contribute a very bright sound and so when you marry that bright sound that can really deliver a lot of that live feel with the weight that you get from the mids forward, shotgun mics that are next to the pa. It really helps glue the entire thing together.
Joseph Cottle (14:51):
Yeah. So you have as far as, I think you said outboard processing through waves, we're running it through two limiters working in tandem to describe what those are doing Exactly.
Caden Van Dorn (15:07):
I think it's good that we're talking about the processing and stuff, but I do want to get a little more into the theory of how you build a stream mix. Let's talk
Speaker 3 (15:17):
About that. Absolutely.
Caden Van Dorn (15:18):
So let's say you have a stream mix right now and it's not where you want to be. The problem at my previous church is that we didn't have any sort of limiting in place or we had a DSP unit that was running our live stream mix. I don't know how it was all set up. I never really touched that while I was there as a volunteer. But our problem was that it was always just way too quiet. And so I don't know about you guys, but when I use my tv, my volume lives around, I don't know, 20 or less,
Joseph Cottle (15:58):
Like
Caden Van Dorn (15:58):
20% or less.
Joseph Cottle (16:00):
Yeah, we're like a 14 family.
Caden Van Dorn (16:01):
Yeah, no, I support this, I support this. But whenever we'd have to watch church online for whatever reason, someone was sick or we were out of town, we would have to punch the volume and to where we were, it was like getting up to 80 or 60 and this just feels ridiculous having to push it this high and all of that comes down to it didn't have proper gain staging and limiting in place. Or maybe you do have a stream mix and you're really punching up that gain, but it's sending itself too high to the point that it's clipping. Yeah,
Joseph Cottle (16:45):
You don't want
Caden Van Dorn (16:46):
That. You just end up having a really distorted mess. And so there are what I would say four tenants to or four pillars of making a successful stream mix. The first one is proper gain staging. So make sure you need a limiter one that's a non-negotiable. You need some way to make sure one that you can keep your audio from distorting, but also important, make sure that your limiters, what's being limited on your limiter translates to what's happening on your live stream mix. So we had this issue for a long, long time. Our stream mix was actually getting run up to our media booth through an analog board. And that analog board was then getting run out into our switcher, which was broadcasting that feed. And the big problem with this is that we would send just for testing purposes, a sign wave through at let's say minus two decibels, DBFS. So two decibels away from clipping on our board, and then it would come through our analog board upstairs and it uses a different system. It's not DBFS, that's a decibel. Full scale is a digital representation. This was using DBVU or something. And so we'd send a minus two signal and then it would get to our board upstairs and it would be like minus eight or it would be plus 12 or something. I don't know. That's a ridiculous example.
Joseph Cottle (18:31):
But
Caden Van Dorn (18:31):
We were always finagling with
Joseph Cottle (18:33):
That. It was never quite right.
Caden Van Dorn (18:34):
It was never quite right. And we were always messing with the gain of our input signal or the trim as it were to try and get those to match. And then that output would go to the switcher and that wouldn't match either. So
Joseph Cottle (18:47):
Who
Caden Van Dorn (18:47):
Knows what's
Joseph Cottle (18:47):
Happening. We have a black magic one me and it has really nice audio in, but it has its own mixer like digital mixer inside of it. So it's another
Caden Van Dorn (18:59):
Gain. It's another gain
Joseph Cottle (19:00):
Stage.
Caden Van Dorn (19:01):
So the most important part when you're building this thing is make sure when you send a test signal through what is minus two DB on your board is minus two DB on your switcher is minus two DB going out to your streaming platform.
Joseph Cottle (19:21):
And just to pause there, I think a big part of that is as few links in the chain as possible. As few
Caden Van Dorn (19:28):
Links as the chain.
Joseph Cottle (19:28):
And so now we've
Caden Van Dorn (19:32):
Bypassed our analog board. I've given up on trying to make it work precisely. That's not to say it could have been done and we could have, I don't know how it kept changing or what kept happening, but we could have dialed it in better and somehow gotten it to set and forget. But the D live works on DBFS. The switcher works on DBFS. If we connect the DB FS to the DB FS thing, minus two will be minus two, will be minus two.
Joseph Cottle (20:06):
The other option here as well, if you're using, and many of you are, you're using a black magic switcher is Dante. And if you have Dante as well, Dante also makes an adapter essentially that will grab Dante from wherever and throw that right into your switcher. It's a little box run to a couple of XLR outs and well, I always get confused. I bought the wrong one. Oops. Twice. Twice. I didn't know about that. Did identify anyways. So again, just to cut out anything in between to get the feed right from your board
Caden Van Dorn (20:45):
Directly
Joseph Cottle (20:45):
To your switcher, those are a couple options.
Caden Van Dorn (20:47):
As few links in the chain as possible. Simpler is better the less. And with some of the other churches I've been supporting, I've been running into this, oh my gosh, they have a compressors and makeup gain all over the place. They're running into one board and this has a limiter and it's making up gain. So it's not like clipping, but it's still getting compressed. And then that sending to another board where the entire mix is getting compressed again and then more makeup gain. And then I just looked on their switcher just a couple of days ago. It was like, wow, there's plus six DB of makeup gain just like from your fader being pushed up on your switcher. That's why your stream is clipping. And so as few links of the chain and as few changes as possible, ideally you want only one place where you make your changes and nothing else is touching it. Our switcher fader is at zero. Our tops. Yeah, there's plus or minus zero decibels. Our record mix on our D live is at zero. There's no additive happening there. And all of our instrument buses and the buses that go into the stream mix, they always start at zero.
Joseph Cottle (22:07):
Right?
Caden Van Dorn (22:07):
I don't want anything being added or taken away.
Joseph Cottle (22:12):
Which pillar are we on now?
Caden Van Dorn (22:13):
This is still pillar one, game
Joseph Cottle (22:15):
Staging. Okay, pillar two, let's go
Caden Van Dorn (22:16):
Pillar two. Having an accurate room, having a room that reflects what the livestream mix is going to be hearing.
Joseph Cottle (22:25):
Yeah. When you say accurate room, what do you mean by that?
Caden Van Dorn (22:29):
Okay, so every church that has a soundboard has a, those speakers are of varying levels of quality. And so they will sound either more accurate or less accurate as to they will either more accurately or less accurately represent the sound that is coming through that system. Got it. And so something that you can run into if you have either a less expensive PA or a poorly set up PA or incorrectly, whatever, I don't want to knock on anybody, is whose job it is to set up their pa.
Joseph Cottle (23:16):
Well, that's a valid concern though because you have to tune your PA for your room.
Caden Van Dorn (23:21):
So the problem that people can run into if their PA doesn't accurately reflect what the signal that is being put through it is that you will compensate at the board for that. So let's say you have a really bright pa and so you are constantly fighting that two to 4K range
(23:44):
In the board. You will be turning down that range on your eq, across the board on everything. And when it comes to, and it may sound, this might be exactly what you want in the room, it might sound amazing and it probably is and continue to make the decisions that sound good for the room. But the problem is when you get to the livestream mix, all of those things that you're taking out will add up when they get into different listening environments with different people who are listening on their phones or their speakers or their TV or whatever. They will be hearing things differently through a different sound system. And all of that two to 4K that you're taking out to reduce harshness for the people listening will end up sounding dull or unclear to the people who are listening on their live stream. And so this is where I get into PA two, and this is important one, it will make things a lot easier for your engineers, and two, it will give you a more accurate picture to send to the live stream.
(24:52):
And so what I do, and this is an endless rabbit hole and a whole other podcast to get into probably, but this can be done very with lots of labor or a little bit. But for starters, I have a $20 barringer reference microphone. I have no idea how accurate it actually is, but it is close enough. And so what I do is I go to the pa, I blast pink noise through the system, and then in the beginning what I would do is I would take a GE QA graphic EQ because most soundboards have those. And then I would look at the signal coming into the microphone and then I would adjust the GEQ, the graphic EQ on the master bus until the signal coming into the microphone looked flat.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Got
Caden Van Dorn (25:48):
It. And so when I look at an untuned pa, I will see lots of spikes all over the place just from the natural characteristics both of the room and of the pa. And so if you can flatten those out, and this will all be well and good for your front of house mix, but for your stream mix, this will allow when your audience is hearing a flat response, that flat response will better translate to your livestream mix because you will have to make less of those decisions across the board to be taking out these problem ranges. They'll just be dealt with from the start. And so that's pillar number two.
Joseph Cottle (26:30):
Yeah. What's pillar three?
Caden Van Dorn (26:31):
Pillar three is having a good engineer
Joseph Cottle (26:34):
Yet,
Caden Van Dorn (26:35):
And I'm not here to take shots at anybody.
Joseph Cottle (26:39):
It's
Caden Van Dorn (26:40):
Hard.
Joseph Cottle (26:40):
It is hard.
Caden Van Dorn (26:41):
It's hard. I was not great for a very long time and I still am completely reevaluating everything I do, every decision I make constantly. It's a constant fight. But having learned under people like our contract engineer Russell, and just having grown in the skill myself, having a balanced mix. When you have a livestream mix and you don't have a dedicated livestream engineer and you are setting everything up as a post fader
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Bus,
Caden Van Dorn (27:17):
The balance that your engineer is able to achieve in the room will be the balance that is on the live stream to a certain extent. You can get, let's say one engineer runs your acoustic guitar a little heavy, you can compensate little things like that. Like, oh, we can take down the acoustic guitar in the stream mix just in that send level. But if you have problems creating a balanced mix, and honestly, working on livestream mixes has made me into a better engineer because everything, I can be at a point where things sound great in the room, but I'll go back to the live stream and feel like, wow, this feels totally out of balance. And that informs my decision making going back to what I was doing.
Joseph Cottle (28:05):
Okay. Now when you're listening to livestream mix, are you listening on the monitors up in our media room?
Caden Van Dorn (28:11):
No, just on my phone.
Joseph Cottle (28:12):
Just on your phone.
Caden Van Dorn (28:13):
Yeah. Phone speakers, whatever. Listen to what the people are listening on.
Joseph Cottle (28:16):
Yeah. Smart
Caden Van Dorn (28:17):
With
Joseph Cottle (28:18):
Saying all of that as well. For smaller churches, you might not think, Hey, well I can't really swing a contract engineer.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
And
Joseph Cottle (28:26):
That's a very valid concern. I would come back at that though and say that if you have somebody who's attending your church that is a competent audio engineer and maybe they're volunteering once a month,
Speaker 3 (28:43):
You'd
Joseph Cottle (28:43):
Be surprised at how many people would show up every week if you offer them a hundred, 250 bucks a week to show up.
(28:52):
And so if you're in the situation, if you're a worship pastor listening to this and you're in that defacto mode of you're the worship pastor, but you're also the A VL director and you're really in need of consistent audio on the weekends, instead of trying to find the budget for a production tech, I have here with Caden and I'm very thankful for if you just have one room, you're not multi-site. It's going to be surprisingly easy, I think to pitch to your executive pastor, Hey, do we have 400 bucks a month that we can give a good audio engineer to show up on the weekends? That's worked so well for us. Russell works just under the c-suite at CV Lloyd av, and he runs projects on D one stadiums and arenas around the country. They just did the Winnipeg Jets, they just did the Washington Commanders, they did the Breslin Center at Michigan State. They did the big stadium here in Lawrence for ku. They did the Rose Bowl a little while ago. These guys, Russell is so unbelievably legitimate, and I don't want to say we're paying him on the weekends, but it's not enough.
(30:06):
But it shows that he shows up for it
Caden Van Dorn (30:09):
Because
Joseph Cottle (30:10):
He loves it and we're throwing him a little bit in exchange to make it a little bit more worth his time. So in a smaller context, a smaller, more small town context, Ben Franklin a week can make, you'd be surprised at who will show up for that. That turns into 400 bucks a month. That's a car payment. Who knows? What's the fourth pillar?
Caden Van Dorn (30:40):
If I could just speak one more thing. Oh sure. What a good audio engineer offers is not necessarily, and this is something that can be trained into your volunteers too, something to be something to shoot for. And I think it's something that every church is striving for,
Speaker 4 (30:58):
But
Caden Van Dorn (30:58):
Not just a quality experience, but a consistent experience. If you train your audio engineers up to offer something consistent that feels the same every time,
(31:13):
That makes it worlds easier to set and forget a live stream mix because you know what to expect. You will be getting, if you have the same level and consistency of product being offered, it's so much easier to make these global decisions about your livestream mix and what's coming into it and feel confident that it will be well represented because your engineer knows how to do the same thing every week. And so that's what having a quality, that's the kind of value that I think we should be instilling in audio engineers is absolutely delivering a consistent product. One, because it's great for the house, but also it makes the livestream mix. It makes it a lot easier to calibrate.
Joseph Cottle (31:59):
Well, and then two, if you're worried about, oh, well, if we have a contract engineer on the weekends, what are my volunteers going to do? I don't know, a church that's, no, a church that would be listening to this podcast that is concerned about church production that doesn't have three or four other events through the week where an audio engineer can show up and run sound for youth, run sound for kids ministry run sound for, there's always something going on. But anyway, let's get onto pillar four.
Caden Van Dorn (32:30):
Pillar four, it almost comes full circle back to gain staging, but there is the idea, and this is how all major streaming platforms determine, this is how they gauge their audio. So every streaming platform shoots for a target loudness called LUFS or ls. Yes. And this is a measurement. This is a long-term measurement over time. And so when you look at a meter and you see that it's reading, I'll go back to minus two, what you're seeing is a peak reading. This is the highest level that is being put in at this very moment. It's a momentary reading. L'S measures a long time
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Average.
Caden Van Dorn (33:19):
And so in waves, there is this other plugin called WLM meter, and it allows you to basically set it and then run it for a few minutes, whatever. Over the course of time, it will take the average level of the signal coming in and it will tell you what the left's value is in audio engineering and mixing. You basically run it over the course of the entire song, and then you look at the final reading at the end. That's not really realistic for a live stream, but in this case, just running it for a couple of minutes will give you a good idea. And there are other ways to read lofts as well. That's just the way that I have done it. And it's a concept to keep in mind rather than a specific number to shoot for.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
So
Caden Van Dorn (34:07):
YouTube and Spotify I believe, which you wouldn't live stream to Spotify, but a lot of these major streaming platforms optimize their audio listening codex services, whatever, to minus 14 Ls. And so that is a pretty loud all things considered average volume.
(34:31):
And so that average volume, that high average volume is what you're looking for. So you could be looking at a meter, let's take it back to what you might be, you are looking at your stream mix, you're looking at it on the meter right now. You could see it getting up to that to your limiter. You could be hitting your limiter pretty hard, but if you see your signal spiking up and down, like going from minus 18 all the way up to zero and hitting the limiter and then back down, if it's spiking making those massive jumps, that's a pretty good clue that you actually have a pretty low lofts value because your average, even though if you have those transient spikes, you have the average volume that is falling back to in between those transients is pretty low.
Joseph Cottle (35:25):
So how would you adjust that crank up some compressor overall, or how would you adjust that to bring that LS up?
Caden Van Dorn (35:33):
So the go-to way is through the use of compression. Yes, that is in the mastering world, that is what you do.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
You
Caden Van Dorn (35:41):
Put into a limiter, you put into a compressor. And what that does, it'll smush down those transient piece, allowing you to bring those lower values
Joseph Cottle (35:53):
Up.
Caden Van Dorn (35:53):
And I would say that most of the time, and this is what we're shooting for in the minus 14 range, when you have ambient, whether it's your pad or in electric guitars or whether it's the down moment of a song, you kind of want that average level of your meter to be living in the minus 20 to minus 16 range. That's a good average volume for people to be listening to where it's like, okay, we're out of the big moments of the song and everything's just disappeared. You can't hear anything anymore. Keeping that high average is very important to having a consistent listening experience so that the big parts sound just as loud as the quiet moments ideally.
Joseph Cottle (36:41):
And just to clarify, when we say you're adding compression, you're adding compression to the top to bring down those spikes, and then you're not using makeup gain to bring up the bottom. That's really just more of like a fader push, right?
Caden Van Dorn (36:56):
In a way, you're using input gain because you don't want to do makeup gain after your limiter because that's when you can get into more cases of just adding more room for error. If you have any gain that's going up past your limiter, then who knows what can happen after that with that.
Joseph Cottle (37:16):
Yeah. So you have, as far as, I think you said outboard processing through waves, we're running it through two limiters working in tandem to describe what those are doing exactly.
Caden Van Dorn (37:32):
The secret sauce really comes down to that L three ultra maximizer. Now, this is a plugin from Waves that is a multi-band limiter. Some of you may be familiar with multi-band compression, this is that. But the ratio jacked up to infinity. And this is a crazy powerful tool. So when you have, under normal circumstances, when you're limiting things, it's just one band across the entire spectrum. And if you have a buildup, say from the punch of a kick drum or the attack of the kick drum or more drums, drums create transient spikes. And a lot of that can be built up around one area. So I'll just stick to the low end of the kick drum for this example. Let's say the low end of your kick drum is really overpowering, and it sounds great in the room. This might be the right decision for getting feel that you want in the room, but that's sending a lot of low end information to your live stream. And you only have so much. You have a set threshold to work with. You can't have it be too quiet, and you definitely can't have it be too loud.
(38:51):
So you really have this very narrow band that you have to work in. So with traditional limiting, if you send that kick drum to that limiter, then it's just going to crush the entire thing. The limiter is going to crush the entire thing to compensate. And so that's where that sort of pumping sound that you can get with really over compressed or heavily limited mixes. But with the L three Ultra maximizer, it has those different bands. It has four bands, I believe. And so when you're sending that same kick drum to this multi-band limiter, it will, all that low end overpowering information will go to just the low band of the limiter. And the limiter will take down that, just that band to compensate.
Joseph Cottle (39:42):
Got it.
Caden Van Dorn (39:43):
And you can, since it's frequency dependent and you're not pumping the entire mix, you can really push this thing. So I think on a given Sunday when things are really getting going, I'm taking out six to eight DB of that low end. And it sounds fine. And it's not contributing to any, it's not taking away, I would say from anything. It's not perceptible. And that's really the goal. Get the processing out of the way. If you notice the processing, I would argue that you need less processing or different
Joseph Cottle (40:22):
Processing. Now for our other streams, specifically in the barn, and we have two venues here on campus, our big room, which is the worship center seats a thousand ish people. We've hosted Phil Wickham and John Bevere. Only found out Phil
Caden Van Dorn (40:42):
Wickham like a couple of weeks ago. That's crazy. Oh
Joseph Cottle (40:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was before a lot of our time. That was before Zach time. Wow. It was probably 10 years ago. Wow. We hosted John Vere and who came with him?
Caden Van Dorn (40:59):
Kim Walker Smith.
Joseph Cottle (40:59):
Kim Walker Smith was with him. We had John Mark McMillan here last year, which that was a surreal experience for me. I was directing the broadcast for that, and it was a conference we were hosting, and he's like,
Caden Van Dorn (41:14):
I'm sorry you weren't able to be in the room for that.
Joseph Cottle (41:16):
I didn't need to be. I was just, I don't even know how to talk about it. Dude, you excited? So excited. I've seen him live before, but to be able to direct that broadcast was really special. And I also had Isaac, who's an Emmy award-winning running cams and just giving me just incredible shots. And I was just, anyway, that's is off topic. So we have our big room where we can host big stuff like that. But then we have a smaller venue that we call the Barn because it is a barn. It's a barn, it's like 120 years old. It's old. We've renovated it, of course, but they literally used to run cattle through there at the turn of the century. And now that's where we have our prayer room. It's Kansas, baby Kansas, and we have a Beringer wing in there, and we stream that twice a week every week. And so how are you using this limiter theory on a smaller unit like the Beringer Wing to work?
Caden Van Dorn (42:20):
Alright, here is where it gets really applicable to people who don't have an outboard wave set up, don't have access to this ultra maximizer, lots of boards, X 32 Beringer wing, all of these super popular boards. M 32, M 32, I think the Allen and Heath SQ five. The SQ series has a multi-brand compressor. Anyways, most modern digital boards have a multi-band compressor on them. And I had been using them before I started leaning into this ultra maximizer trick. I had been using those for different applications, but once I put it on the stream mix and realized how well it worked in our main auditorium, I took that same principle and I brought it to, I thought, Hey, why don't I try doing the same thing? Beringer has this effect called the Combinator, which is a multi-band compressor. Why don't I try jacking up the ratio on it and just going for the same effect. And so I ended up putting that on our stream bus on there, and it's given me pretty similar results, even though it's not technically a dedicated limiter per se.
Joseph Cottle (43:44):
True. And do we have room mics? We do not in the barn. And so the barn will sound, if you watch our go prayer streams, go, prayer is our prayer ministry. It's going to sound, it's going to feel a little drier than what you're going to get from Sunday morning. Correct. Yeah.
Caden Van Dorn (44:02):
Well, yeah, obviously have reverb senses to it to kind of emulate the feel of a room mic. But it all sounds very digital and not, it's hard to, it's not the room.
Joseph Cottle (44:11):
It's hard to replicate the room
Caden Van Dorn (44:13):
Sound.
Joseph Cottle (44:14):
And that's what makes Bethel albums and Hillsong albums sound the way they do, I think, is that they're the live albums anyways, this is just, it's live. You can't replicate a room very well. I have heard people try to do it, and it does not sound good where they add in crowd noise after and it's just weird. So that's very practical because a lot of people now are using the Wing or using some kind of digital board that has that, and you're essentially just taking a compressor and turning it into a limiter.
Caden Van Dorn (44:49):
Doing my best. Yes. Turn the attack all the way
Joseph Cottle (44:52):
Down,
Caden Van Dorn (44:52):
Turn the ratio all the way up effectively. You have a limiter. Not quite the same, but it's basically there. It's for all intents and purposes, it's a limiter.
Joseph Cottle (45:02):
Caden, this has been a great conversation and hopefully we'll have you back on to talk about some more things down the road. Thank you for taking the time with us this morning. We appreciate it.
Caden Van Dorn (45:15):
Thanks everybody for tolerating my incessant ramblings.
Joseph Cottle (45:19):
It's not rambling.
Caden Van Dorn (45:21):
I hope that someone might be able to glean at least a little bit of value from it. And if anybody wants to reach out, I do offer a bit of consulting services
Speaker 3 (45:33):
Just
Caden Van Dorn (45:34):
On the side too, and that's something I'm getting more into. And while maybe my explanations can be shaky at some points, I would hope that the results are good. And so if anybody wants to reach out to me, I would be happy to offer any more specific advice.
Joseph Cottle (45:54):
Yeah, we'll put your contact information in the show notes.
Caden Van Dorn (45:57):
Yeah, I'd appreciate that.
Joseph Cottle (45:58):
Alright.
Caden Van Dorn (45:59):
Thanks
Joseph Cottle (45:59):
Caden.
Caden Van Dorn (46:00):
Yeah.
Joseph Cottle (46:01):
See you at the office.
Caden Van Dorn (46:02):
See you. We're not going anywhere. We're just going to, yeah. Goodbye. I'll see you the rest of the day today. Bye.
Joseph Cottle (46:13):
Thanks again for listening to the church production podcast from church production.com. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast, our email list and our YouTube channel, as well as follow us on Instagram for everything church production.