In the past few days I’ve come across a resource for church audio that I think everyone associated with house of worship markets should know about called OwnTheMix.com. I’ve never seen anything like this so please consider this a must investigate for your team!
From their website…OwnTheMix.com is a comprehensive audio training solution for the modern church. Created by Buckhead Church’s Audio Director, Dustin Whitt, and Music Director, Chris Green, you will learn secrets to creating irresistible worship environments. Whether novice or professional, there is plenty for everyone inside. Subscribers have an all-access pass to every video, and are connected to all of OwnTheMix.com’s users through a state-of-the-art social network that includes forums, blogs, and groups based on like interests or topics. What makes this content unique is that there is an important balance between tech & music – they get the necessity of this unique partnership that is so critical to audio success in churches.
Training topics include basic EQ, compression, and gating for bass, electrics, keys, drums, & vocals, miking instruments, combat mixing, console gain structure, basic drum tuning for engineers, mixing musically, EQ and mic placement for speech, transitions, working with musicians, working with drummers, and much more. There’s also training content that currently focuses on the Digidesign Venue platform, although videos are coming soon that will also train on Aviom & the Yamaha M7CL. Finally there are several multi-part interviews with other members of the Northpoint audio team such as Dave Stagl and Chris Briley, and notable FOH engineers such as Jeff Sandstrom (Chris Tomlin).
A 1-year subscription starts at $200 for a single seat and the price per seat goes down as you add more users from your organization to the site. The really cool thing is that if they were to put an accurate price tag on what is taught in this site, it wouldn’t be affordable for many churches. The value is extremely high! If you paid a contract soundguy $50 an hour to run your Sunday services just for one morning, you’ve paid for an entire year of training for a committed volunteer. The site really is one-of-a-kind and content is still being added weekly.
I’m proud to say Kensington Church has secured a license for our entire audio team and I will be leading our team through this content over the coming year. It has been on my heart for months to find a way to focus on basic audio concepts and develop more of a culture of organized continuing education for the team but had yet to find a means that would be the right fit.
I showcased a new book I picked up this past winter called “Mixing Audio” on this blog that is the best resource I’ve ever read for the art of mixing music. The problem is that a large percentage of our audio team are also campus tech directors or work full time jobs in other industries entirely, so I expected a tough sell to get everyone to read such a large, focused book and get together for discussions.
OwnTheMix is perfect for us because we can “assign” a handful of videos for guys to watch on their own time that are reasonably short for those with ADD attention spans (it seems most average 3-6 minutes) and pack lots of solid concepts in each one. Then we’ll meet together every other week for an hour to unpack what we’re learning and discuss questions or applications. I’m excited to see what God will do in our team over the coming months!
I can’t recommend this resource enough. If you are involved in church audio in any way, RUN to this site and sign up for you and your team. I’m certain you won’t be disappointed!