Recording, Editing, and Mixing Your Church’s Podcast in Ableton Live

One of the best ways to reach your congregation outside the doors of the church is through a podcast. You can easily take your sermon and share the audio in a way that’s easy to consume, and church members can listen wherever they are. While sharing a nicely edited, multicamera recording of your sermon is nice, not everyone has the resources or ability to make that happen. Sharing that content in a high-quality audio format is an easy and affordable way to share your message every Sunday.

According to Podcasthosting.org, 68 million people listen to podcasts weekly and 16 million listeners in the US would consider themselves “avid podcast fans.” For little to no cost, you have the possibility of reaching 68 million people. It’s time to consider podcasting if you haven’t!

The thought of recording, editing, and mixing a weekly podcast might sound daunting, but there are some specific features in Ableton Live that make it sustainable. While you may not think of Ableton Live when you think of podcasting, I can speak from personal experience that it’s an incredibly efficient, high-quality tool for producing a podcast. I’ve used Ableton Live as the central tool for three seasons of my podcast. Let’s dive into the process of recording, editing, and mixing a podcast in Ableton Live.

Recording Your Sermon in Ableton Live

In order to start putting together your podcast, you’ll need to first record your sermon. There are multiple scenarios and ways in which we can make this happen. Let’s walk through a few scenarios that would provide us with a good recording of our sermon audio.

Record directly in Ableton Live from your soundboard

If you’re using a digital mixing console that includes a USB sound card, then you can connect a USB cable into a computer running Ableton Live and record directly into Ableton Live. This is an amazingly convenient and simple way to pass multiple channels of audio into Ableton Live for recording.

Route audio from your soundboard into an interface connected to Ableton Live

If you have enough outputs available from your console, then you can connect a cable directly from your console into your audio interface. If you don’t have a dedicated output, you can always “Y” off the main outputs to feed your interface. This will allow you to record (preferably) a direct output of your sermon mic.

Record to an SD card using a hard-disk recorder

You may have a hard-disk recorder already connected to your sound console, or you may have a console with a recorder built in. If that’s the case, then take the SD card or whatever medium you record to and import that audio into Ableton Live. While this requires an extra step, you’ll likely find it convenient not to need a computer to capture the audio from your sermon.

Whatever the method you use to capture your audio, here are a few pointers for the best result:

• Consider multitrack recording your pastor’s mic as well as room mics. Adding in the room mics will allow your recording to feel “live” and help the listener hear the congregation’s response to the message. With these mics as separate inputs into Ableton Live, you’ll be able to adjust the blend while you’re mixing to make sure room mics aren’t too hot in the mix and are only turned up at the appropriate times (laugh lines or congregation participation).

• If at all possible, record your sources pre-EQ or processing (such as compressors, limiters, de-essers). To make a headset mic work for a room, you may surgically carve out frequencies to avoid feedback or to improve intelligibility, but that may not translate well on a recording. With the recording directly from the source, you can apply your own EQ, dynamics, and processing on that signal.

• Consider patching a backup mic channel to Ableton Live, as well. If your pastor’s main mic goes out, then you’ll be focused on getting the backup mic turned on and ready to go. In that moment, you won’t have time to repatch audio to Ableton Live. Without that backup mic, your sermon for that week is unusable. With your backup also patched, it will immediately pick up signal in the case you need to switch to it. I can speak from personal experience that this is something worth figuring out before you need it.

• Consider recording the full service instead of hoping you remember to press record right before the sermon. You’ll end up with a longer file to edit down, but it’s better than forgetting to hit record before the sermon. “I’m not speaking from personal experience here,” he admits sheepishly.

Editing Your Sermon Audio

Once you’ve got a great recording of the sermon, you’ll need to get to work editing your content. You may be simply editing out the sermon from a full recording, adding a fade in and out, and posting; or you may be adding intro/outro music and a pre-recorded intro, but, either way, you’ll be doing some editing of some sort.

Here are a few pointers that will help while editing audio in Live.

Save Clips to Create a Quick Assembly Edit

If you’re creating a fairly produced podcast with intros, outros, and music beds in addition to your sermon, then you may want to consider creating an assembly edit first. In the video-production world, an assembly edit is one of the first, if not the first, edits you create of your content. You’re essentially bringing all your content from various places onto the timeline without concern for transitions or precise edits. You want to start by getting all your content in the right place before you refine your edit.

While producing and editing my podcast, I find it quite helpful to save frequently used audio segments and music beds in Session View. Then I can easily drag those segments from Session View into Arrangement View to create an assembly edit that brings together all my content.

For example, for a recent season of my podcast, I interviewed the top playback techs in the world. I ended up with almost 15 really amazing interviews that I needed to chop up in order to start piecing together interviews. You can see this process in action here:

I started by chopping up each guest into small segments, naming them so that I knew what they were discussing, and color-coding them based on if I should likely use them for the show. I saved these clips in Session View.

Next, I could browse these clips per guest in Live’s browser. This allowed me to quickly access segments from each interview without leaving Live.

I would click and drag specific clips into Arrangement View to start to create that assembly edit. Again, at this point, I’m not concerned with perfecting transitions or trimming space; I’m simply looking to get everything in the right order in Arrangement View.

While you may not be parsing through multiple interviews to put clips together for a podcast, this technique can help you really quickly produce a great podcast. Save any intros/outros, interviews, or the like as clips in Session View and quickly create an assembly edit of your content.

Quick Edits

With your assembly edit done, next you’ll want to tighten up transitions and trim clips. This is an incredibly quick process in Ableton Live. Using the edit time commands, you can trim dead space from clips, remove gaps of silence, and keep all your content in place.

In the example below, I want to trim the time between two clips.

First, I can highlight the space between the two clips.

Next, using the “Delete Time” menu command (or the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-Delete), I can quickly delete the space between these clips and bring them closer together.

With these shortcuts, I can quickly make edits to my content to remove gaps and extend or add time to make the flow just right.

Precise Edits

Finally, while you’re editing, you may want to tighten up a transition or need to cut out a small piece of a clip. If you’re looking for fine editing, then you may find yourself annoyed with Live’s “Snap to Grid” feature. This is an amazing feature when you’re looking to make high-level edits like deleting a chorus or doubling a bridge, but, when you need to select a small amount of a clip, you’ll likely want to disable this feature.

To temporarily disable the grid while editing, hold down the Command key (on Mac; Ctrl on PC) while dragging with your mouse, and you can highlight an area of a clip without being restricted to the grid. From there, you can apply any edit time commands to get your clips dialed in just right.

Mixing Your Podcast

The thought of having to mix a weekly podcast can quickly seem overwhelming. While it could easily turn into a massive project, I’ve found a couple tips that help me speed up the process.

Create Presets

I personally have found one of the best tips and tricks to reduce being overwhelmed is to create and save presets that speed up this process. While it’s possible to buy “mix” templates, I’m not referring to that idea here.

Instead, I’m referring to the idea of saving your work so that you can reuse it next time. For example, I personally have the same vocal chain at home in the studio that I record with every time. For one of my first podcast episodes, I created a vocal chain in Ableton that seemed to work well with that mic.

I saved my EQ, dynamics, and compression effects into an Audio Effect Rack. This allows me to have a good starting place each time I go to mix my mic.

Here’s how to save an audio-effect chain in Ableton Live:

• Click the device title bar of the leftmost effect.

• Hold Shift on your computer keyboard.
• Click the device title bar of the rightmost effect.

• Right-click on the device title bar of any of the effects and choose “Group.”

• Click the disk icon on the new Audio Effect Rack that you created.

• Type a name you want to use and hit Return to save your preset.

Your preset is now saved in Live’s User Library and accessible across all your projects!

To access your effect: From Live’s browser, click on User Library/Presets/Audio Effect Rack and select your preset.

It’s important to note: This won’t provide an instant mix, and you’ll still need to tweak and adjust to get things dialed in perfectly, but it will get you much closer than starting from scratch each time. You can create presets for each person speaking, presets based on mics they might use, and quickly access them each week as you mix.

Mix in Session View

Another thing that I find helps me dial in a mix quickly is adjusting faders in Session View. I personally prefer mixing in Session View as I get a quick overview of levels and can see an actual fader that I can adjust as needed. There are times I’ll dial things in or add fades in and out of segments; but, in general, I’m going to switch over to Session View to quickly get a handle on my mix.

Creating Fades with Shortcuts

Finally, a tip I overuse when I’m mixing podcasts in Live is quickly adding fades using Live’s “Create Fade Shortcut.” An example of when this comes in handy is if you’re fading out music as someone’s vocal comes in. Using the shortcut can save you from having to manually draw in or record fades each time. Here’s how:

• Using your mouse or a trackpad, highlight the end of your clip to where you want the fade to begin.

• Right-click on your clip and choose the “Create Fade Out” menu command. To speed up this process, use the keyboard shortcut (Option-Command-F) to quickly apply a fade.

This allows me to quickly jump around my arrangement and add fades in and out of content without needing to manually draw those in.

Exporting Your Podcast

The final step in your podcast journey is to get your audio out of Ableton Live so you can upload to your podcast host.

To export your audio, navigate to the “Export Audio/Video” command found under the File menu.

To keep file sizes low and to keep your podcast accessible to as many people as possible, you’ll want to export an MP3 version of your file to upload to your podcast host. Here are the settings I choose when I’m exporting podcast audio from Live:

• Turn “Normalize” on to maximize volume. (Disable this if you’ve already determined you’ve hit your volume goals with a metering plug-in like WLM Plus from Waves or if you’ve checked with meters in Live natively.)

• Set your sample rate to 44.1kHz.

• Turn on the “MP3” option to export an MP3 version of your podcast.

• Finally, hit “Export” to export your audio file.

While releasing your sermon as a podcast is a great way to reach your congregation during the week, the weekly commitment to release content can feel overwhelming. But, by using Ableton Live and applying the tips we’ve discussed in this article, you’ll find the process to be frictionless and encouraging.