Like many people who enjoy music, I haven't had much of an opportunity to play at live events over the last year which means that I've taken more interest lately in recording. Recording can be a lot of fun and there's an opportunity for everything from the most free-wheeling creativity to the nerdiest technical details. You can decide whether to record an entire event as if the person listening was in the room or you can layer up voice after voice of people from across North America as we did with our Christmas choir a few months ago. You can adjust the recording in all sorts of ways and if the scripture reader from the previous week mispronounced a word you can go into the recording, snip that word out, and replace it with a correctly pronounced copy from elsewhere in the reading.

The tools to make this happen used to be costly, difficult to maintain, fragile, and took long years of training to use effectively. But as technology developed, you can now get close to a studio-quality recorded sound with your smartphone or even the computer you are reading this article on. You can use software that's free to anybody and not difficult to learn. There's never been a better time to make recordings whether you are doing it because you enjoy reading, preaching, singing with acoustic instruments and looped samples of computer-generated music or just because you want to put your old vinyl albums or cassette tapes onto your phone so you can listen to them in the car.

One thing that comes along with recording voices and acoustic instruments is a visual representation of the sound. It helps the person doing the recording to keep track of what's already been done and see whether it contains a good quality signal. It's often shown as a graph with time along the horizontal line and the volume of the recorded signal shown vertically. You can see how loud each voice is, where the gaps are, and whether there are any problems with the recording. Below is Charlene Sawatzky speaking. You can see by the size of her signal that the microphone is too far away, so we adjusted that before we recorded the rest of the worship service. You can see how she punctuates the beginning and end of what she has to say with a slightly louder sound.

Below is Pastor Russell praying. Russell has a much different speech pattern than Charlene and he's using a different type of microphone. Both of those things show in his signal. Like most people, Russell's voice is different when he prays than when he reads, preaches, or speaks casually.

Each person's voice leaves its own pattern and people who do a lot of recording learn to recognize people they know by how their voices look in the same way that you might recognize your friends' handwriting. Many people feel self-conscious when they first hear their own recorded voice and even hearing the voices of our friends and family members coming out of our speaker system or our headphones takes some getting used to. In the same way, people sometimes feel self-conscious when they see their voice and how it's different from other people's in the same way that handwriting is.

Once you've recorded an event you can make changes if you want to. With spoken parts, those changes are usually intended to make the speaker easier to understand. Sometimes there are changes to make the speaker's voice sound more pleasant or easier on the ears in the opinion of the person editing the sound. You can speed the speaker up if they talk really slow or slow them down if they speak too quickly. Awkward or distracting mouth sounds can be removed along with pauses or coughing or saying, “um” too often. You can use compression to even out the sound of someone who has a variable voice. Sometimes when we're recording for church the singers or speakers make mistakes and we throw that recording out and start again. You can make a lot of improvements to how someone sounds in the same way that a photographer might touch up your portrait to remove the zit on your chin or clean up the spot you forgot to shave.

Below is our guest speaker from two weeks ago, Elijah Windle, preaching. He recorded his sermon in Texas and someone used a compression effect very aggressively on his signal before they sent it to us or maybe he got his computer to do it automatically. Pauses have also been removed so the track is squished together both in time and volume. You can see how it looks like a mowed lawn rather than a varied level from the raw audio tracks of Charlene and Russell above. This is a heavily retouched portrait of Elijah's voice. I'm sure those of you who know him recognized that his voice in the sermon sounded more steady, measured, with even intensity level and no pauses than it sounds like when talking to him in person. This too is because of audio editing.

This coming Sunday we begin meeting in person for worship again after several months of only hearing pre-recorded worship services. I am looking forward to it, as I know many people are. At the same time, I'm also not looking forward to it. I enjoy being able to think about what I've recorded and try again if it didn't come out quite right. I like being able to remove awkward pauses or slips of the tongue. If I'm playing guitar for a recording and I forget how the song goes I can stop the recording and practice a bit and then start over. When that happens in a real live worship service it can be awkward and distracting for others and embarrassing for me. If the scripture reader accidentally says 'immorality' instead of 'immortality' when we're recording we laugh about it and either repair it later or record again. When that happens in real live church we still laugh about it but the thing is done and everybody heard it. When we are recording for a church service it's nice to have the participants stand in a socially distant circle and see one another as they sing and speak. It's a much different experience from standing beside each other in front of the assembled congregation to sing or speak. Both from the recording process and listening on Sundays, I have come to enjoy recorded church in ways that I did not expect and I will miss it if we stop once public health restrictions relax.

These things have come as a surprise for me. I thought I knew myself quite well and I thought I knew what I sounded like and therefore what I really am like. I thought I liked real live church services a lot and would never enjoy making or listening to recorded church on the internet. It turns out that I do enjoy pre-recorded church and when I see that said on the record it's not exactly what I expected. I'm a bit self-conscious in the same way that people are to hear themselves reading scripture or singing for the first time.

Do you remember hearing yourself on a recording for the first time? Did it take a while to recognize and was it uncomfortable to hear? Did you need to adjust your own internal image of what you thought you sounded like? Do you ever wish you could present a more carefully edited version of yourself to the people you know or to God? Do you have days when you wish you could stop the recording, throw it out, and begin again? Do you have old recordings made on reel to reel tape or cassette or vinyl that you wish you could listen to now? Do you wish you could make a recording of yourself or someone you love? As we start to meet again for in-person worship services, are there ways that we can take advantage of recording and make use of them in real life?