Photo by James Owen on Unsplash
Dave Stagl is a professional sound engineer in Atlanta, Georgia. He spends a lot of time in his studio mixing and doing audio post-production, as well as music production. On the weekends, he’s mixing front of house for churches in the Atlanta area. He also goes out on the road and works with churches to train and coach volunteers and staff members. He wants churches to understand that professional audio gear is only the first step to great sound.
Dave Stagl Headshot
Dave Stagl was audio director at Atlanta's North Point Community Church before founding Stagl Productions. Since then he's worked with such artists as Jesus Culture, Lecrae, , Steve Fee, Todd Fields, Kristian Stanfill, Passion, Rudy Currence, Carah Faye, Eagle Brook Church, Free Chapel, Mount Paran Church, and many more.
“Think about sound while you’re capturing video. If your camera shot was out of focus, you wouldn't keep rolling. You would fix it. But a lot of times people, they're just not thinking about the audio,” - Dave Stagl, of Atlanta's Stagl Productions.
“I think a lot of people thought for a long time that, ‘Hey, that's all we need to do. We just need to spend a bunch of money and get a great sound system and get a great console.’ But at the end of the day, what we're doing in church production, it's really a craft. It's an art and we can upgrade our tools and that makes a difference. But if you don't learn to master your craft, it doesn't really matter what tools you have. So that's more of what I'm doing is I go in and help teach the craft and the art of mixing to help these churches sound better and reach the people they're trying to reach,” Stagl says.
But he also understands that perfecting a craft is tough with a rotation of volunteers, some of whom may only be mixing once a month. “I tell people that it's more of a musical discipline, what we're doing when we're mixing,” Stagl explains. “I'm a musician. When we were playing on Sundays, I go home and practice. I can go home and spend all day long working on those songs and be ready for Sunday. For the audio team, historically, there hasn't been a way to practice unless the band has been on stage.”
But now things are different. Stagl helps volunteers figure out where should they focus when they are practicing and learning on Sundays. But he’s also encouraging them to use tools like virtual soundcheck to actually practice. He says it’s a game changer for learning the craft.
Join Dave Stagl, a professional sound engineer in Atlanta at the Capture Summit, July 25-27, 2022 at the John Maxwell Conference Center at 12Stone Church in Duluth (Atlanta), GA. He'll be teaching churches how to improve their live and recorded audio.
“So virtual soundcheck, basically, it's the ability to multitrack record your services off of your console. And then you can play back that recording right through your console,” he explains. “When our band would come in and rehearse on Wednesday night, they would wrap up about eight or nine o'clock and when they went home, we would spend another hour or two just playing back the recording from the rehearsal. And it would give us the ability to really fine tune the mix.”
He says it gives the audio person time to practice and listen to figure out who is playing interesting parts, because in the heat of rehearsals there are things you might miss like a cool keyboard part or an interesting guitar lick.
He says, “Some of that stuff can get lost when you're just kind of in the moment trying to make rehearsals happen and even make Sundays happen. But if you can stop and slow down a little bit and just go through the recordings, you can start to find that there are all these little gems that the musicians are playing and then you can start figuring out ‘How am I going to pull that out in the service to really take that music to the next level?’”
While virtual soundcheck used to be a high-end thing, it’s now much more common so even small to medium-sized churches can access it as long as they have a digital console.
Stagl does a lot of post-production work and cleans up recordings for churches. Church video editors routinely send him AAF or OMF multi-track audio files from video editing software like Premier or DaVinci Resolve. He loads the file into his DAW (digital audio workstation) and cleans up their audio edits. Stagl says he spends a lot of time de-noising and EQ’ing – things he believes a lot of churches could be doing internally with the right training. And he says when the audio is cleaner, background effects work better.
“A lot of the videos I hear at churches end up with the music bed so low relative to any of the narration or what I would call dialogue from on camera. And it ends up kind of robbing the videos of any kind of emotional impact because the music ends up so low. So, what I can do is get the voices a lot cleaner so then I can get the music louder and get it all leveled out so that it plays back cleaner and just sounds professional and helps people get their message across.,” he explains.
But he says even though it is getting easier to clean up audio after the fact, churches need to always think about sound while they’re capturing video. “Just think about it. If your camera shot was out of focus, you wouldn't keep rolling. You would fix it. But a lot of times people, they're just not thinking about the audio.”
The first step, Stagl says, is listening to the space. If it's reverberant, use some moving blankets to help deaden it or look for another room. Outside, ideally, you’d look for locations as quiet as possible. But for extraneous noises you can’t get rid of, he tells content creators to be sure to give the noise context in the video.
“Right next to a highway is probably not the best for audio, but if you are going to shoot next to a highway, I think you want to make it obvious in the shot. When you have that visual context for the noise, suddenly it's not as big of a deal,” he explains. “Rain is pretty difficult for me. Maybe there are some guys who can do it, but for me, that's a bit of a challenge. If you can see the rain in the shot, now you hear it. You see it. It's not as big of a deal. It becomes acceptable.”
Stagl works with churches to get better audio for testimonials and news pieces, he teaches mixing, and live streaming and he says mic placement is also very important.
“If you're putting a lav on somebody, you want to try and put it somewhere that minimizes the rustling of clothing,” he says. “You really have to pay attention to it because you want to minimize rustling because that's another one of those things that’s harder to clean up. I mean you can get it a little bit with the tools that are out there today, but it's a lot harder. You also want to watch for rattling jewelry and things like that especially.”
And finally, he has a lot to say about mic’ing pastors. “Let's just be honest. Most of the services we do these days in modern churches, somebody is going to be talking for 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 minutes. In some places, the music might only take up a fraction of that. So, we need to get them sounding as good as they can too, because they've got the bulk of the message that they're going to be communicating on a Sunday.”
Stagl will be speaking at the Capture Summit coming up July 25-27 at The John Maxwell Leadership Center at 12Stone Church in Atlanta. He will lead several sessions on creating great audio for video.
Capture is a three-day event exclusively for church filmmakers and content creators to learn, grow and collaborate with other churches and it features the annual Church Filmcraft Festival.
