Sound Mixing TipsCreating The Mighty Choir

Chet Barnett

How many times have you wished your church choir was twice as big as it is? How often have you wished you were not so limited by acoustic problems in the choir area or by monitors feeding into the choir mics as loudly as the choir itself? For the big program where everything has to sound right, there just might be a fix for these problems.

The fix is to pre-record the choir voices and mix the pre-recorded track in with the live choir voices. This procedure will do a number of things to help you get around problems.

1. It will take the limits off the levels at which you are able to run the choir, since a track is not subject to feedback.

2. It will allow you to run the pre-recorded voices back through the choir monitors. This will sound the same to the choir as if their live voices were being fed back to them, and it gives the choir the feeling that they can hear themselves really well. This will help the live choir to sing with more spirit and feeling at the time of performance.

3. Using a voice track goes a long way toward fixing the problem of instruments and monitors bleeding back into the choir mics.

4. You now have a choir twice as large as you had before making the track. If there are any weak vocal areas in a song, i.e. a men’s unison, you can give that special attention at the time you make the track and push the voice track a bit during performance.

Using a choir voice track does not, in my view, get into the area of ethics. The voices on the track are the actual voices of your choir. We are making a vocal track to help get around problems and make the listening experience for the audience the very best it can be.

When making a choral voice track, we need one track for voices and one track for the count-off, for the instrument used for choir pitch, and a light drumbeat or click track to be used for instrumental meter in the live performance. Live instruments will be used at the live performance and they will get their cue and meter from the track through monitors and/or headphones. If the church has a DAT recorder or a minidisc recorder, that would be best, but a good two track cassette recorder will suffice. Record the track on chrome tape and use noise reduction. For the larger church, we might want to purchase an eight track DAT recorder so we can fine tune things even more, like recording each vocal part on a track.

If you have any questions about this method, experiment with it on one song and see what it does for your choir. The results could be interesting.