Just popped up while reading your post, Amie!
Just to add a bit more discussion to Alan's excellent article, here's an except from a magazine article I wrote many years ago regarding "wet v. dry"
recording....as it relates to recording audio in a church...
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The clarity vs. natural sound struggle
Unfortunately for event videographers, a church is one of the toughest locations to try to capture good sound. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds in a cathedral. Due to the typical expansiveness and the many hard, sound-reflective surfaces, the chances are very good that you will hear a very reverberant, “echoey” sound. Reverb is a term for a natural phenomenon whereby sounds reflect around a room and therefore arrive at your ears from different directions. Your brain has the ability to decipher the direction of these multiple sound sources due to your two ears receiving the sound at very slightly delayed times. Unfortunately, a video camera does not have the brain to do this! This is why you might hear a speaking voice on the alter as perfectly acceptable from the center of the church, yet a sound recorded from that same spot to be much less intelligible when played back in your edit suite. Reverb has a tendency to produce a fuller, richer sound for music, yet causes less intelligibility in voices.
Recording clear, intelligible audio requires the microphone to be placed as close as possible to the sound source. If you consider your desired sound source to be the appropriate “signal”, and people coughing, church kneelers slamming down as guests are seated and passing traffic to be “noise”, what you are doing with your mic placement is, in a very real way, controlling your signal to noise ratio. The choice of microphones for various situations and sound sources in a church is worthy of an article in itself, but the general rule of getting the mic close to the source always applies. Despite it being a necessity, many times close-miking causes the sound to be unnatural, losing that reverberant sound that you would expect to hear in that particular environment. Close-miking not only reduces the extraneous noise of guests and air conditioners and nearby traffic, it also reduces the amount of room reflections (reverb) that you hear. Remember that in your final production, what your eyes see and what your ears hear should “match”.
Our studio’s goal is to keep the intelligibility and cleanliness of close-miking, but at the same time, produce a “natural” sound that contains the reverb we expect to hear in this environment. As a former audiophile I struggled to record exceptional audio in churches for wedding ceremonies, starting years ago with a single wireless placed on the groom and now typically using 5 to 6 microphones on many occasions. In the past, I would place a microphone near readers, soloists and musicians and yet never be satisfied with the sound quality for aesthetic reasons. We would have intelligibility, but a very “dry, sterile” sound.
In some churches I have received permission to tap into their PA system, negating the need to place my own mics next to the churches’ existing ones. This can be done via a headphone jack output on the PA’s preamp, amp, or mixer. I use a 1/4” to XLR impedance-matching transformer, and run standard XLR low-impedance cable to my camera’s input. (Be sure to experiment with this ahead of time, using the headphone-level control on the PA system to give you a proper level output that your camera can handle!) Although this can save you the time of having to duplicate the church’s mics at each location, the sound quality is even more lifeless, as you capture even less of the reverb that’s present in the church.
Audio magic in a box
Adding an audio processor to your editing rack can enable you to close-mic your sound sources for the cleanest possible recordings on location, yet add a little bit of reverb in post production to make the sound much more realistic. You end up with the best of both worlds: clear intelligibility, yet a beautifully rich, full sound.
Videographers think nothing of comparing special effects devices (and spending thousands of dollars) to tweak their picture quality and add fancy transitions to their arsenal, but rarely consider adding audio post-production equipment. This is where the Multi Effects Audio Processor can come into play. An audio processor can add reverb, digital delay, chorus, flangers, phasers, tremolos, pitch shifters, equalizers, noise gates, compression and much more to your signal just as a video mixer can add basic wipes, dissolves or many 3-D effects to your picture. And, just like many video productions are often done best with simple cuts, dissolves, and fades, your audio processor can be very effective when used sparingly. Because you have the ability to add special effects doesn’t mean you always should! With an audio processor, less is definitely more and you can quickly get into trouble by overusing it. For our purposes, we very rarely add anything more than a little reverb to our audio signal. This is known as “wetting” the sound; the unaltered audio is termed “dry”. We use a fair amount of reverb for the musicians, only a little for the officiator and readers, and usually none at all for the vows. You expect to hear that “big echoey” sound for a trumpet, and a “sweet, full” sound for a string quartet, but reverb is not appropriate for a couple whispering their vows if accuracy is your goal.
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