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Recording services?

Many churches record services to distribute to members who cannot attend the services but like to keep in touch, those who are housebound or missionary partners overseas. In most cases, this consists of a cassette recording of whatever comes through the amplifier, followed by time-consuming duplication.

If only one or two copies are needed, this can be a good solution, but more recent technology might make the recordings

Interested? Read on!

Recording Technique

The first and most important aspect of recording is the quality of audio which will be recorded. So we will look at recording methods first, and then go on to look at recording media (CD etc) below

What to record?

To start with, think about what you want to record. Only the spoken word (maybe readings and a sermon)? Or would you like to record the whole service (with hymns, prayers etc too?). Consider what the final result should be, and who you expect to listen to the recording. If possible, ask those who you think might use the recordings, and find out what they would like. Some might simply want sermons to listen to again, or keep for reference, some might want to remember particular items of praise or an entire service which they found particularly significant.

The answers to the above may be different for every church. Once you have an idea what you would like to record, you can move on to the technical aspects of obtaining a good quality recording.

Pick it up!

Each aspect of the service which is to be recorded needs a method of picking up the sound and converting it to an electrical signal which can be controlled and recorded. For example, you might use a microphone to pick up speaking or acoustic instruments, or a cable connection to electronic keyboards. If you already have an amplifier or mixing desk, you may not have to think about this very much, but it is important to remember that the sound which is normally fed to the loudspeakers may not be what you want to record. One example would be a band with bass guitar and drum kit, where little or none of the sound from these instruments may need to come from the loudspeakers as their own sound levels or backline may be adequate. However, if this is recorded, the mix of instruments will sound unbalanced. This is where specification of the right equipment and, just as important, training is vital. If you have no audio system installed, it may be cost-effective to install a system suitable for recording and amplification.

However, in most cases, some parts of the service (for example congregational singing) will need extra equipment to allow them to be recorded. We can help you to choose appropriate equipment for your budget and specific needs.

Amplify and mix

Once the signal is picked up, it needs to be processed before being sent to the recorder. Depending on what is being recorded, this might need a small inexpensive microphone mixer costing under £100 or a multi-channel mixing desk costing several thousand pounds. It is important that you get good advice before you buy to make sure you get the system that suits your needs. Once again, we can help!

Control the recording

Finally, you need someone or something to control the recording. This may be an automatic mixer or compressor or a person who selects what is to be recorded and mixes the sound for optimum quality.

The latter option is usually preferable for anything other than the simplest systems, however clever the technology, a trained operator can always do better!

Now you have an idea of the system you need, we will consider the options to record the sound onto.

Recording media

Some of the options you might want to consider for your church are:

If you have considered any of the latter options in the past and been put off by price and complexity, it may be time to think again!

Cassette

This is the traditional method of recording church services, at least for the last 20 to 30 years. Inexpensive recorders are available, most people have access to cassette players in the home, and the blank cassettes only cost about £0.50.

Unfortunately, cassette is a fairly low quality recording media. It is noisy (there is always a background hiss, even with modern noise reduction systems on high-end recorders), and so recording level can be critical. If the recording level is low, the hiss will be distracting, if it is too high, the recording will be distorted and intelligibility will be poor.

Cassettes can be copied on a twin-tape machine, at normal speed (90 minutes to copy a 90 minute cassette) or on high speed duplicators (which will copy in one tenth of the time, or faster, and can be higher quality). Duplicators are expensive (several hundred pounds) and quite complex machines, and, like cassette decks, require regular alignment for best recording quality.

If you are using a cassette recorder, make a note to give it some basic attention once a year. A bottle of isopropyl alcohol and some cotton buds, and a spare 15 minutes after a service, will be enough to clean the recording and playback heads, and the pinch roller and capstan. Any well-used machine would also benefit from a full alignment. As a guideline, if recordings are muffled, even after head cleaning, this may be necessary. Alignment requires a certain amount of equipment (tools, test tapes, oscilloscope and voltmeter) and skill, contact us if you think you might need it.

Recordable CD

This is usually seen as the easiest step up from cassette recordings. Standalone CD recorders are readily available, typically costing from 100 to 1000 pounds. The resulting disc can be played in most CD players to be found in homes, cars, and computers. (Some old players have difficulty with the reduced contrast of some recordable CD discs, and even more have difficulty with the reusable CD-RW discs)

The quality should be excellent, with any noise probably being due to problems in the microphones or mixer! The resulting disc can be readily duplicated, either using a PC with appropriate software and a recordable CD drive, or a standalone duplicator. In either case, typical duplication times are less than one tenth of the duration of the recording, and most duplicators allow multiple drives to be added to make several copies simultaneously.

CD is limited to recordings of 74 minutes (80 with some special discs), so may not be suitable for longer events without judicious editing.

The obvious benefit of recording on CD is that it is simple, even the most technophobic sound system operator who can record to cassette can learn to use a CD recorder to at least as high a standard in 30 minutes or less. No editing is required, so if availability of volunteers is limited, a standalone CD recorder can give a step increase in quality at very low cost.

One disadvantage of standalone recordings is the importance of avoiding overload. If a cassette recording is at too high a level (into the red), there will be distortion, a harsh noise on playback. If the same problem occurs on a CD recording, the distortion sounds much harsher (often described as metallic), and more obvious. The solution is to record at a lower level. At best, a cassette can record about 40dB of dynamic range, in other words, it can record a whisper barely audible above the background noise and normal speech which is just starting to cause distortion. A CD can record about 96dB dynamic range, for example you could record distant birdsong barely audible above the background noise and the sound of a road-breaking pneumatic drill about a metre away! Don't worry if dB's don't make sense, the point is that with a CD recorder, the signal level should be set so that at typical sound levels (band playing, or other loudest noises), the meter on the recorder should read something between -18dB and -12dB. That means that if there is a sudden loud noise (cymbal crash, applause, or similar), there will not be distortion.

The down-side of this is that a well recorded CD from a standalone recorder will sound very quiet when it is played back, compared to a commercially recorded disc. The result may be that those who listen to the CD will be annoyed that they have to turn up the volume significantly to listen to CDs from church, and even more importantly turn it down before they play a commercial CD. The missing step is what is called 'mastering', and for that, you really need to use a computer-based recorder...

Computer-based CD recording

As we noted above, while standalone recordings are much better than cassette, they are not quite up to the standard of a commercial recording, but all is not lost! Either the CD can be taken away after the service for someone to do the 'mastering' needed before duplication, or the service can be recorded directly on a PC-based audio recording system in the church and mastered there. We usually recommend the latter, as it makes the recordings available faster and is simpler to use.

As in all our work, we can do various things to help- such as

We currently recommend, install and support Ubuntu Linux as the most appropriate base for the recording system, with audacity recording and audio editing software. All software we currently supply or recommend is protected under the GPL license. As far as the customer is concerned this means that the software is free of charge to use and distribute, there are no shareware fees or, worse, breaches of copyright required to use the system! The side benefit is that we have confidence that this software is well supported and regularly updated with features and, where necessary, bugfixes!

Again, training is essential, a certain amount of this can be self-taught if the operators are sufficiently self-motivated to do so, but we can provide detailed training and support as required. The flexibility of a computer-based system is that we can also set up semi-automated systems to minimise the amount of work required to produce a good quality recording.

The Audacity software is particularly easy to use, again a small step from recording to a cassette is all that is required to do basic recording and writing CDs. But the real power of this system comes after the recording is made. You can easily make a more professional sounding, easier to listen to, recording, which will be of real value to those who use it. Typically you would:

MP3s and the internet

Maybe you've seen the minister walking around with a natty looking pair of earphones attached to a little white music box called an iPod and wondered if they're getting paid too much? Or maybe you'd just like to make your services even more accessible to those who don't want to come up to a stranger and order a copy of a CD. Enter the Internet! If your church already has a website, it's a very simple step to make your services available, maybe within a few minutes of the final hymn, to anyone anywhere in the world. If you already have a computer based recording system, it's incredibly simple to make an 'MP3' version of your service for download. The big advantage of MP3 is that it makes the recording smaller without having too much effect on the sound, so instead of someone having to download a 300MB sermon (even on a typical ADSL line, that would take nearly 45 minutes), they may have only 30MB to download (just 5 minutes). Once downloaded, they can play it on their PC, or one of the thousands of MP3 players now available.

So what's the catch? Well, you need to get the file to the internet, if you don't have a network connection in the church, someone might need to take it home to upload it. And you also need to check with your church internet provider if you have a 'bandwidth limit'. For example, if your recording is 30MB and the limit is 3GB per month, you can only have 20 people download one service each week before you get extra charges. Some internet providers have no limits, some have small extra charges, and some may block access to the website once a limit is reached, it's usually simple to find out what their rules are!

Live streaming audio

The ultimate to offer to those who cannot attend is live audio, so they can enjoy the full service as it happens. This might be a useful way to regularly relay the service to nursing homes, a local radio station, individual homes or anywhere else in the world.

While this might seem like the ideal solution, it is not as simple as the above methods, and may not be suitable for your needs. If you think it might be of interest to your church, contact us to help you to deal with the pitfalls and jargon, so you can produce an effective and well used system.