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In last week’s post, we had a general discussion about how to set levels, mostly around what one source should be relative to another. This week, we’ll look at the primary way we measure how loud something is when we hear it, its Sound Pressure Level or SPL. SPL is how we objectively know how loud sound is, if you know how to use these units.

How do you know how loud something should be? That seems like a really easy answer, but at the same time it’s incredibly subjective. How loud should a kick drum be? How about the background music while someone is speaking? Here we’ll try and give some basic, objective ways to know how to get your audio levels just right.

Terrible pun aside, microphones are incredibly important to live and recorded sound. They’re so important, it leads to a whole lot of specialization. With so many microphones out there, how in the world do we know what to use?

One of the most common experiences in churches and other medium-sized venues is mixing monitors from the front of house position. In smaller venues, musicians won’t have monitors at all; they can hear themselves fine either acoustically or through the front of house sound system. In larger venues, there’s often another technician whose sole job is to mix monitors for the musicians. But in what seems like most venues, there’s only one person — and that person is likely you.