You record the house system's problem before you record the choir's. Take a split of every input the PA already has, add your own choir and audience microphones, move the Leslie and the drum kit out of the choir microphones' line of sight, and accept that the room and the congregation are on the record. The mix in Burbank then becomes a time-alignment and bleed job rather than a balance job. Inglewood has the model for it. Kurt Carr and the Kurt Carr Singers recorded "Awesome Wonder" live at Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood in 2000, with a rhythm section and a choir of about three dozen credited singers, and the album reached number 5 on Billboard's gospel chart and went gold (Awesome Wonder).
Which rooms are we talking about, and why Inglewood?
Two, and both are PA rooms. The first is the church's own sanctuary. The second is an arena: at the end of 2000 Faithful Central, a congregation of more than 12,000, bought the Great Western Forum on Manchester Boulevard and held Sunday services in a 17,500-seat building until 2009 (Kia Forum). The Forum opened on 30 December 1967, a Charles Luckman design with a cable-suspended roof 407 feet across, three miles east of LAX.
Inglewood is a separate city rather than a neighbourhood of Los Angeles, and what that means for permits and for the arrival path overhead is in recording in Inglewood with LAX overhead. For a gospel session the geography is a church, a Sunday, and 20 to 25 miles back to Burbank up the 405 and along the 134, about 35 minutes early on a Sunday and far more by mid-afternoon.
Why is the PA the first microphone?
Because in a service the house system is running, the choir microphones feed it, and it fires back at them. Main hangs 12 to 20 metres from the risers put a copy of the choir into the choir microphones 35 to 60 ms late, only a few dB below the direct sound. It widens every consonant, and EQ does nothing to it.
Three decisions reduce it. Split every input at microphone level through a transformer-isolated splitter, one leg to front of house, one to the recording rig, as for a live cast album in a small theatre. Ask the house engineer to carry the choir in the PA only as far as the room needs it, since the front rows hear the risers acoustically. And hang your own choir microphones higher and tighter than the PA's, so the recorded choir is closer to the singers than the loudspeakers are.
Paul White and Hugh Robjohns recorded a large youth choir with five PA-fed SM58s in front of the soloists and their own condensers behind, took a DI'd aux of the house SM58 mix as a safety, and found that headroom set at 6 to 12 dB in rehearsal fell to 3 dB in the show because everyone sang louder (Sound On Sound). They also had the choir take their shoes off to cut riser noise.
Where do the choir microphones go?
One cardioid condenser per 8 to 10 singers, 1 to 1.5 metres above the front row, about a metre out, aimed at the back row so each covers a wedge of the risers, and one per section so sopranos, altos and tenors can be rebalanced later. The pair technique I use for a choir in a Glendale hall does not survive a rhythm section; here the spots are the record and the pair is the room.
The lead singers work on handheld dynamics that already go into the PA. Take their splits and add nothing: a gospel soloist turns to the choir and walks to the congregation, and a stand-mounted condenser only catches the moments they are off it.
What do you do with the Hammond and the Leslie?
A B3 into a Leslie 122 is two rotors in a wooden cabinet, a treble horn on top and a bass rotor below, and the Doppler shift from the spin is the sound (ProSoundWeb). In a church it usually sits within a few metres of the risers. Shure's Frank Gilbert: an SM81 on the horn turns into a vocal microphone next to a 30-member gospel choir, so on a loud stage he uses a pair of Beta 57s on the top louvers for their off-axis rejection and a Beta 52 on the bass rotor a touch off axis (Shure). The rotor throws wind when the motor runs and nobody is playing, so those channels get muted during the sermon.
For a record I move the cabinet: behind the risers with the louvers facing away from the choir, or into a side room with a window, on a longer cable, with a wedge for the organist. Mike Sessler's church moved its 122 into an isolation room and put two microphones on opposite sides of the top horn in polarity, and he reports that as the step that cleaned the sound up. Top pair hard left and right, bass rotor in the centre.
What happens with the drums and the congregation?
The drum kit goes into every microphone in the building. In the Sound On Sound session the drums fed so far into the choir and orchestra microphones that the dedicated percussion microphone was redundant. In a sanctuary with a hard floor the choir microphones are the drum room microphones by default, so the close microphones on the kit exist for definition, and a shield with a lid, or the kit in the same side room as the Leslie, keeps the choir microphones usable.
The congregation is an instrument on this kind of record: claps on two and four, responses, the chorus sung back. A pair of wide cardioids on 3-metre stands 8 to 12 metres from the stage, plus a pair at the back wall. At 8 metres the audience pair arrives 23 ms after the close microphones; nudge it forward for tightness or leave it for depth, but decide, because unaligned it thickens the low mids on every downbeat.
What comes back to Burbank?
Between 48 and 64 tracks: six to eight choir, two to four soloists, three on the Leslie, bass DI, eight to ten on the kit, keyboard DIs, guitar, four audience, the pastor's microphone, and the house two-track as a reference only.
The first job is alignment. Measure the distances on the day, write them on the input list, and nudge the choir and audience microphones against the close microphones before any fader moves. The second is the soloists: White and Robjohns ran their vocal spots into a subgroup with about 6 dB of compression on peaks and automated the levels, which is still the way to keep a moving lead even. The third is restraint on reverb, because the room is already printed in every choir microphone. A short plate on the lead if it needs glue, and the sanctuary does the rest of it.
I have mixed and mastered records built on voices and traditional instrumentation recorded in rooms never designed for them, including Eurovision entries for Ukraine (mixing bandura against an orchestra). Those credits with their sources are at /credits.
Frequently asked
Can a live gospel album be recorded during a normal Sunday service? Yes, and most of them are. The cost is that the house PA is in every choir microphone, so the split and the placement decide the record before the mix starts.
Where should the Leslie cabinet go? Out of the choir microphones' line of sight: behind the risers or in a side room with a window, on a longer cable, with a monitor for the organist. Two dynamics on the top louvers and a kick microphone on the bass rotor.
How far is Inglewood from Burbank? About 20 to 25 miles: the 405 north to the 134 east, 35 minutes off peak and 80 or more at 5 p.m. A Sunday 7 a.m. load-in is the easy direction.
If you have a choir, a band and a Sunday
Send the input list the house engineer already runs, a photo of the risers from the back of the room, and the service order with the songs marked. What comes back is a split plan, a microphone list with positions, and a note on where the kit and the cabinet should sit. Background and contact at /about.