I have to be honest, choir miking, choir mixing, just dealing with our choir in general, is something that I’ve always struggled with. I’ve been struggling with it for the past 10 years. Maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but seriously, like many others, the church I work for suffers from some aging technology in our main sanctuary, and it seems like we’re always “just about to upgrade.” Not that I’m blaming the gear or the people, it’s actually a confluence of several factors that makes our choir particularly challenging. So perhaps by writing this article, I can get some of this off of my chest, and hopefully impart some wisdom and things I’ve learned.
The number one challenge in our traditional worship service is that the bulk of our microphones are in front of our house P.A! Some of you may be familiar with my plight. Our room is shaped like a cross, and the resulting setup is less than ideal. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but you play the cards you’re dealt. Given these circumstances, how do we deal with our choir to get them sounding great and not feeding back through the house and monitor systems?
Know Your Choir
The first step to miking a choir is knowing how the different parts of the choir are physically arranged so you can mic them properly. I’m no expert on the physical arrangement of choirs, and I’ve seen it done several different ways, but I think our setup is typical. The general arrangement (from the conductor’s perspective), from left to right, is soprano, tenor and bass in the center with the bass section behind the tenor section, and alto, as shown in Fig. 1.
When I first started at my current church nearly a decade ago, our choir was miked with four hanging shotguns. No, I didn’t mistype, and you didn’t misread… shotguns. The results were what you’d expect. The shotguns strongly highlighted small groups of the choir while rejecting anything even slightly off-axis. I don’t know who originally hung those mics, but I get why they did it. They wanted more gain before feedback, so they sacrificed any sort of natural choir sound in order to achieve it. At the time that those were hung, I believe there was a small Mackie mixer and very limited signal processing available, which is a far cry from the high-end digital mixer that we have today. Faced with those circumstances, I can see why someone might try using shotguns to improve gain before feedback. Ironically, it didn’t help all that much. The off-axis polar response of mics like this can be terribly unpredictable and feedback was still an issue. Most importantly, the sound quality and intelligibility of the mics was lacking.
It didn’t take me long to start experimenting with different mics and configurations, and over the years I’ve been through several iterations. At one point we used some really nice cardioid, large-diaphragm condensers. While the mics themselves were great, I found they had poor gain before feedback and they were a bit unsightly. We are currently using four newly purchased Earthworks C30/HC hypercardioid microphones that I absolutely love. We use one mic per section of the choir (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), and they’ve made a huge improvement in our overall choir sound. The hypercardioid pattern gives us an open and natural sound, while still giving us some off-axis rejection and these mics exhibit very little off-axis coloration, so even choir members who sit fairly far off of the microphone’s axis sound natural, and this is where a lot of other mics suffer. An added benefit is that the hypercardioid pattern is better at rejecting reflections and reverberation. The entire area around our choir loft is all hard, reflective surfaces, so the tighter polar pattern helps capture the choir and reject some of the ambience that would cause our choir sound to be less intelligible. The mics are currently on stands so that we can move them around and find optimal positioning, but ultimately they’ll be hung in place.
Choir Monitoring
In addition to the challenge of our choir being somewhat in front of our main P.A., we’ve also struggled with getting good gain before feedback (and good sound in general) from the choir monitors. Part of this is due to less-than-adequate monitors that don’t provide proper coverage to our entire choir loft. As a result, we’re running the monitors a bit hotter than we should just so everyone in the loft can hear. We do put a small amount of the choir microphones back through their own monitors as well. This is a practice that I wish we could get away from, but the choir is sandwiched by a pipe organ behind them, and instrumentation in front of them, so it can legitimately be difficult for the members to hear themselves. One thing that really helped us was properly tuning the choir monitors as flat as possible, which made them a lot more stable in terms of feedback. The combination of properly tuned monitors and our new choir mics has made for a much more pleasant situation all around.
There is no “right” way to mic a choir. Your physical surroundings will often dictate how this is handled. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is not to over-mic the choir. Like any other sound source, too many microphones in close proximity to one another will cause all sorts of comb filtering nightmares. Less is truly more in this case, and some experimentation (possibly during mid-week choir rehearsals) is the key to getting a good choir sound in your room.
Vince Lepore is the technical director at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando and teaches live production at Full Sail University.
