Mics on boom stands for piano/organ players

[JJSTEELE]

Hello all,

Looking for some advice on mic types for putting on boom stands to be used by our piano and organ players.

Our church is small, and on some Sunday's we don't have enough singers present who are comfortable being up front in the choir rows. Like lots of churches we go through peaks and valleys in attendence, and on those Sunday's when attendence is lower for these key people, our instrumentalists would like to lend their voices through the system.

We have the boom stands, but I am curious if condenser mics may yield a better effect for this application. Since they can't hold the mic to be sure they are getting good proxmity all the time (which I have found quite important for dynamic mics) my thought was that condensers would work better. Their greater sensitivity working better for this situation.

Thoughts anyone? Should it matter, or would you anticipate that condensers would work better than dynamics in this case?

I don't want to simply make the dynamics "hotter" and spoil what we have been doing for our gain structure.

[liko81]

I would be careful with the generalization that a condenser would be "better" in any given situation. Specific to yours, you'll be balancing two concerns; the importance of proximity of singers to mikes, and the level of isolation of singers from each other and their instruments. The less that the vocalist's specific distance from the mike matters, the more will be heard in addition to the vocalist, and vice versa. Condensers, I think you'll find, exacerbate the tradeoff because of their higher sensitivity; getting good isolation in an open space with a condenser requires better attention paid to proximity, while using even a cardioid condenser to reduce proximity effects will result in significant bleed-over, which will be problematic if you have a lot of stage volume from acoustic instruments, instrument amps, or if your band is tightly clustered.

That said, mikes on boom stands are the go-to method for instrumentalists to sing. Your instrumentalists are quite simply going to have to learn not to lean in and back away while singing. You might position the mikes similar to how they should be held; when the performer steps up, the grill is right at their lower lip and the barrel is angled upward toward their mouth. They should be touching the grill, or darn close, and shouldn't back away. You will then adjust their relative volume levels and their mix with the choir's mikes.

I would not break the bank for this; spending $250-$300 each for "soloist"-level supercardioid condensers could cost you thousands, raise eyebrows in the choir (who are using one or two ensemble mikes rather than individual soloist mikes), and because you're looking to add to an ensemble sound, and not capture finely-nuanced solo voice, will not be used to their potential. Three-packs of Sennheiser e835s are $230-ish (about $75 a mike) and are great, industry-workhorse mikes for general vocals. You can get SM58s for a little more per mike; they'll do the same job, they're internationally-recognized workhorses, and they're darn near bulletproof. Either of these will do the trick, and even if you end up going to something else, you WILL find something else to use them for.

[Tim Padrick]

IME, most of the better sounding mics (KMS105, KSM9, VX10, AE5400, E965, PR22,.....) pic up way too much stage wash. I'm a fan of the Sennheiser 835/935, EV 767/967, and Audix OM3/OM6 (or OM7 if folks can be trained to be lips-on-the grill singers). (Watch some live vids of Sarah McLaughlin - here lips are commonly glued to the mic when she's at the piano. There's no reason your folks can't learn to do that.)

[JJSTEELE]

I thank you for the feedback. All makes sense. I teach/design computer software for a living, and I am often faced with trying to make the user "smarter" rather than trying to make the application more "forgiving".

Your correct of course - our people need to be better users of the equipment to really get the very best effect.

Thanks

[andrewc2]

You also could always give the mic's you currently have a try and then maybe see if you could borrow/rent/demo another type to see if they work better for your environment.