Our live stream mix used to be a coin flip.
It sounded different week to week, and not because the gear changed. It came down to who was in the chair. We needed two people to run the stream, one watching it and one mixing audio in Logic Pro. When the right person was there it sounded great. When they weren't, it drifted.
Mixing in a DAW takes real skill to stay consistent at. EQ, compression, routing. That's a lot to ask of somebody on a Sunday morning.
So we stopped. Now the stream mix comes off a bus on the Behringer WING, and one person runs the whole thing.
It's the best mix we've ever had.
We use one of the WING's main mixes for the stream. The WING has four, and they work like bus mixes.
Using a main mix instead of a regular bus means you can see and control what's going to both the house and the stream from the same place. That visibility is most of the value.
Select any channel, go to the main mix sends tab, and you'll see the send level to the house and to the stream side by side.
Ours is post-fader. That means when someone moves the main fader, the stream level moves with it proportionally. Set a channel to -4dB for the stream and it stays -4dB relative to the house no matter what happens during the service.
That's the part that makes this work with volunteers. The mix follows the person mixing the room. Nobody has to remember to ride a second set of faders.
I recorded a Sunday and played it back through virtual sound check.
That let me build the house mix I wanted first, then use it as a reference while I adjusted the stream mix. I listened on a few different speakers and on headphones to find what needed moving.
Do this once, properly, on a weekday. It's worth more than months of small tweaks during services.
I run an LA-2A on the stream mix for compression. Some people would call it too much. I like it, because a stream gets listened to on phone speakers and car stereos, and compression is what keeps the quiet parts audible there.
There's a precision limiter after it so the output level is loud enough to compete with everything else someone might be watching.
Our broadcast room has the WING and a computer on the production network, so we run Mixing Station for real-time monitoring and adjustments.
The layout is customizable, so the main page just shows the stream mix faders. Moving those affects the stream only, never the house.
We also feed room mics into the stream mix, which get adjusted from here. The tracks bank lets us handle backing tracks separately from the house too.
A bus mix has a higher floor. Someone newer gets a solid result without fighting plugins.
You get the automation of a post-fader mix plus the ability to nudge things live when you need to. And it doesn't take a dedicated person, which means a volunteer gets a Sunday back every week.
Simpler didn't just mean easier here. It meant more consistent, and honestly better.
The best setup isn't the most advanced one. It's the one that runs the same whether your most skilled volunteer is there or not. That idea is what the Church Notion System is built around, for every role on your team and not just audio.
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