Jake Russell Audio

Jake Russell Audio I help church sound volunteers facilitate more engaging worship by learning to create a professional audio mix on the gear they already have.

For more free resources and to go deeper with me, check out my website jakerussellaudio.com

You put out a 45 minute video about mixing a kick drum on the X32, an eccentric thing to do by any metric or standards, ...
08/05/2026

You put out a 45 minute video about mixing a kick drum on the X32, an eccentric thing to do by any metric or standards, so I expected some comments.

You know, things like, “man, you must be fun at parties,” or, “wow… a little much, huh?” Or even, “do you talk about this stuff with your family this much?”

But no. It’s the hands.

Comment “Kick” if you think you can take these hands 🙌

07/28/2026

Comment "EP 1" for the full episode.

I want to be clear first and foremost… I'm not against production in worship, and I'm completely for excellence in worship.

But the second that the focus of worship is on the production, the great things we can do, or even "What can I get out of this?" I say shut it down and shut it down for as long as it takes to remember why we're doing this in the first place.

If we can’t worship without the great gear and fun songs…. Well…. What are we even doing?

07/13/2026

If you're a worship leader, this is probably the most important thing I could tell you.

Source tones and arrangements are the two strongest things that determine if your church has great sound. And both of those are in your hands.

In most churches, here's what's actually happening. You've got inexperienced musicians who are blindly playing arrangements with no real direction. The only thing they're getting from the worship leader is "hey, let's play verse one here, we'll play these chords." End of story. That's not arranging. That's just the order of the song.

Nobody's directing parts or saying "hey, don't play during the verse" or "try a different voicing on that chord" or "your tone needs to change for this section." And because of that, the sound person is stuck trying to polish something that was never set up to sound good in the first place, and let's be real, they probably aren't equipped to mix on that level and then they get all the blame for the bad sound.

What I've found after 20 years of leading worship and running sound, if you as the worship leader don't take the time to learn source tones and arrangements, you've set a ceiling on how good your church can ever sound.

No gear upgrade fixes it. No new speakers, no new console, no new anything. You will never get past the quality of what's happening on stage.

The good news is that's fixable. And it starts with you.

Comment SOURCE and I'll send you the full breakdown on how to get your worship team and sound team working together.

07/10/2026

Your sound person in church isn't just part of a backstage crew. They're part of the worship team.

I think a lot of churches accidentally (or intentionally) treat the sound booth like it's separate from the stage. The band rehearses together, runs through songs, sometimes talks about the set, and then the sound person just kind of... shows up.

That doesn't work.

Every decision at the console is a musical decision and directly affects the outcome of the choices made onstage. They aren't just technical decisions made at the board, they're worship decisions.

The sound team has to understand what's happening on stage the same way the musicians do. They need to know why a song builds, where the dynamics shift, what the keys player is actually going for with that pad sound. Not because they need to be musicians, but because they're shaping what comes out of the speakers.

When your tech team and worship team operate together, the worship in your church will improve exponentially.

If that's not how your team operates right now, it can be. Start with the source.

05/22/2026

A toilet flushed through the sound system on one of my first freelance gigs.

Everyone loves a good, “I messed up” story 😅

Years ago I got hired to mix for a band and speaker I really respected. Nothing “major” but it was important to me. It was the first time someone wanted to work with me specifically, not through a production company so it was a big deal to me.

The speaker got delayed in travel and didn’t arrive until right before the service started. So I never got to talk to him directly. The promoter told me the speaker likes to mute and unmute his own mic and prefers his channel stay open in case he wants to say something during worship which is fine with me usually. That’s how I worked with my own pastor.

Worship starts, things are going well. A few songs in I start hearing something weird. It sounded like people talking but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from or even be sure of what I was hearing. It was kind of buried in the music.

Then the band dies down a little bit aaaand there it is… A toilet flushing. Through the PA.

I muted that channel so fast and decided I wasn’t listening to whatever instructions I had been given because either the pastor made a major mistake or I was told the wrong thing to do.

Obviously this was a pretty “free flowing” kind of night so there wasn’t a lot of specific structure to anything but looking back, the real mistake wasn’t the workflow. It was that I didn’t insist on connecting with the speaker directly or at least someone who could tell me for sure how he wanted to operate since it was his gig in the first place. I took secondhand information about how he wanted to operate and ran with it. If I had gone the extra mile to confirm everything face to face, we probably would’ve had a plan that didn’t leave room for that to happen.

Communicate. Then over-communicate. Work out every detail before the service starts. Not just the order of events but how you’re going to operate through the whole thing. Leave zero gray area.

It’s never happened again lol.

05/17/2026

Someone commented on one of my videos, “Finally a worship band that doesn’t use tracks for a change.”

I get why people feel that way. But that’s not exactly where I stand on this.

I don’t use tracks. It’s just my personal preference. I love having live musicians and I think there’s something special about a fully live band leading worship together and fully creating something.

But I’m not against them.

If your team has less experienced players and tracks help you put together a fuller sound for your congregation, that’s cool with me. Use them.

Where I think tracks get misused is when they become a crutch for teams that don’t actually need them. Not even from just a playing standpoint, when they literally aren’t needed in the arrangement and aren’t adding anything. Tracks for tracks sake.

Or when they lock the worship leader into a rigid arrangement where there’s no room to follow where the Spirit is leading.

There are tools out there now that make tracks wayyyyy more flexible than they used to be. So it’s not as black and white as it was not that long ago and in a lot of ways this isn’t even an issue anymore. Folks just aren’t using the tools.

It really comes down to what serves your church best.
Not just doing what the big churches are doing. What actually helps your people worship.

That’s a really short explanation of where I land on a nuanced topic lol. What do you guys think?

05/04/2026

I don’t set up mute groups on the Behringer Wing. Haven’t in a long time.

I use three DCAs instead. Drums, band, and vocals. Those are my input channel DCAs, and I turn on DCA mute groups so that when I mute a DCA it mutes everything in it. Same result, less setup.

There are probably more “proper” ways to do it. I just don’t care. This works every Sunday and I never have to think about it.

The other thing I do is group my effects into DCAs. So my drum reverb and gated reverb are on one DCA. My aux verb and shimmer are on another. Vocal verb gets its own. Delay gets its own.

Quick tip if you do this: pull the bus level down a bit and let the DCA fader be your control. That way you’ve got more range on the fader for the small moves during a set. Makes a big difference when you’re trying to ride effects in and out.

Three input DCAs. Four effects DCAs. That’s my whole workflow. Try it this Sunday and see how much less jumping around you do.

Comment DCA and I’ll send you my full Wing DCA breakdown.

LiveMixing LiveSound DCA WingTutorial SoundMinistry WorshipTeam ChurchTech LiveSoundTips MixingTips AudioTips

05/03/2026

Im trying to have a moment here

Your kick out mic can be the muddiest thing in your mix.There's almost always a big buildup in the low mids, somewhere a...
04/27/2026

Your kick out mic can be the muddiest thing in your mix.

There's almost always a big buildup in the low mids, somewhere around 100 to 200 hertz, and then that boxy mid-range on top of it. If you're not dealing with both of those, the kick just sounds like a thuddy mess or a basketball bouncing on a gym floor.

In this video I walk through three different ways to mix a kick out mic on the Behringer Wing. First one keeps it simple with just the default gate, EQ, and compressor. Then I take it further with the dbx compressor and the Maxxer EQ for more bottom end and top end.

The big takeaway is there's no one way to do it. It depends on your drummer, your mic, and your room. But having a few approaches in your back pocket means you're not guessing on Sunday morning.

Comment KICK and I'll send you the full video.

04/21/2026

Most people hear our livestream and assume there’s more going on than there actually is. There’s not.

It’s just a good playing and tone, a good starting point on the Behringer Wing with some intentional processing on the livestream output.

I run our front of house and our livestream off the same console. One Wing. Two mixes. No second console, no DAW, no complicated routing. I just use the Wing’s main outputs differently and run a few inserts on the livestream to get it broadcast-ready.

That guitar solo you’re hearing is from this past Sunday. Drums, bass, keys, and one electric guitar through the Wing. That’s it.
I put together a full video walking through exactly how I set this up.

Comment “stream” and I’ll send it to you.

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