Pastors voice goes up and down help!!!

[Cliff]

Cool, try a little compression as well. Can make a huge difference.
Compression is not bad, just not necessarily the place to start.

If and that is a big if, if you could get him to wear a headset mic it would help a lot. Unfortunately not all are willing to do what is best.

[daver2]

Don't buy expensive equipment as a first response to a problem you are having. Ask questions on CMN, get some advice, try some experiments and then come to an informed decision. If you then decide the equipment you have is not good enough - you have tried to get the best out of what you have got. Next - pray for some money to buy some better equipment - but now you know exactly what you want it to do and what the specification should be.

If you have concerns - talk to the Pastor (as has been said in a previous post). Ask for a bit of their time in an afternoon or evening to have a bit of a practice and try out some different techniques and see what sounds best. Record the service on a Sunday and play back some of the highlights that identify particular problem areas for you.

Your Pastor should be open to dialogue on this - as one the main goals of the A/V system is to proclaim the message as CLEARLY as possible. Our last Pastor had a very loud voice and he thought he could project into the Church without an audio amplification system. He was correct - until I pointed out we had hearing impaired people who listen on the T loop, the quiet baby room (which was sound insulated), and we recorded the sermon for Sunday School teachers, the website, our missionaries and when people wanted to order back sermons or sermon series. He agreed with me after listening to a CD that we needed to work together!

To your mic placement. If you have found it better to move it down his chest that's good. Have you tried to turn it around a bit higher up? I find sometimes that pointing the mic. downwards helps. Everytime I watch a BBC news program - the interviewers and interviewees have two tie clip microphones (for redundancy - we can't afford that) both pointing downwards. When I tried that I found that I had to tweak the GAIN, EQ etc. but for some of the Pastors I got a better result - but not all.

We tried headset mics - but no takers (although last Sunday I did have an enquiry from one Pastor who asked if they could try one). Perhaps prayer does work after all!!!

Dave

[Arlin]

Regarding how to point the lapel mic:
Be careful with this. In a tv studio setting, most lapel mics are omni, so how they are oriented is not important... they don't need to worry about feedback.

But, in a live setting, many (not all) lapel mics are directional. Pointing the mic away from the mouth/head can dramatically reduce its level & dramatically degrade gain before feedback.