All of the samples in this portfolio have been recorded live unless otherwise noted.  The studio quality sound is arrived at by doing multi-track digital recordings during the live performance.  The production starts out by recording every vocal mic, instrument and multiple mics on drum kits  and doing a mixdown at a later time.  I use a Yamaha O1V196 digital mixer sending the discrete channel outputs over multiple ADAT pipes to a Motu 828 interface.  The tracks are then sent to a laptop over firewire running CuBase which results in individual raw 24bit WAV files for every track.  The recording point of the tracks is prior to any effects and void of compression, reverb etc.

The Contemporary Christian tracks are captured in a similar fashion.  The church has a Mackie TT24 digital mixer and a Motu Traveler for audio recording.  The drum tracks, however, are limited to an analog mixer at the drum kit which submixes the drums in real time down to a stereo two track feed to the house TT24.

The raw tracks are then imported into CuBase Studio or ProTools for mix-down which includes studio enhancements such as compressors and gates where needed, adding in reverb and delays to simulate the live acoustics.  Part of the trick of getting a studio recording sound is ensuing only the needed tracks are in the mix and eliminating background noise tracks like those coming from backup vocalists mics when not singing.  The hardest mics to clean up are the drums since they need to stay in the mix full time.  Gates work best here.

I always welcome comments and suggestions about how to continually improve this process of capturing and producing live recordings.