As we all know, it’s important that musicians and vocalists can hear themselves (and others) while they’re performing. If they can’t, they might rush or drag tempo or end up sharp or flat in relation to everything else. So we have developed means by which to allow folks on the platform to hear what they need to hear — sometimes via speakers in proximity to them, and sometimes little earbuds. Choirs present an interesting case that doesn’t quite align with the pop/rock paradigm to which we’ve grown accustomed to serving. It’s easy to feed monitor mixes to a drummer, bassist, a couple of guitarists, a keyboard player, and a few vocalists. Why? Because they’re tidily discrete. Choirs are more of a big mass of vocals… and part of the mass sings bass, part sings tenor… and alto and soprano too… you get the idea. It’s a sprawling source of sound compared to a single vocalist. It’s easy to point a floor wedge monitor toward a gal singing and strumming a guitar so she can hear stuff clearly. It’s less easy to do so with our big large choir. And to be sure, it’s important for our choir members to hear one another and also important for them to hear other stuff, like drums, keyboards, and other vocals so as to maintain proper relative timing and pitch. So we must find a way. I can just imagine the non-tech-savvy representative from church leadership saying, “Well, we use those little earbuds for the musicians and we can get them at the big box store for like five dollars, right? Let’s get a bunch of those and hand them out to the members of the choir!” Of course, we shake our heads, look at the floor, and explain about transmitters, receivers, and low quality plasticky earbuds and numerous other things. Indeed — IEMs would be an unlikely solution due to cost and complexity.
So how DO we get monitor mixes into the ears of our choir? Well, unless we have a small choir and a big budget, IEMs are indeed pretty much out of the question, so let’s get our focus on speakers. But first, we need to consider the other end of the audio chain — microphones. The nice tidy handheld mics we put in front of our front line worship leaders tend toward cardioid — maybe even super- or hyper-cardioid. The sound source in that case is a single human voice, so we can narrow the width of the pickup pattern and thereby reduce the likelihood of feedback (or increase our gain before feedback — whichever way you like to put it). On the other hand, the sound source in the case of a choir is an amalgamation of many human voices, and that source is physically wider than a single human voice. This means we need a wider pickup pattern for choirs than we do for individual vocals, and indeed, the likelihood for feedback increases with that additional width. Our focus here is monitoring, so we won’t go wading too far off into the microphone weeds, but it’s worth stating that we can achieve better results if we choose the right mics for the job. The pickup pattern needs to be sufficiently wide but not too wide.
Once we sort out the microphone side of the equation, we can move on to deal with our speakers. In the same way that it’s a good idea to limit the pickup pattern of our mics, it’s also a good idea to limit the dispersion pattern of our speakers. Also, it’s of utmost importance that we point our speakers in the right direction. Specifically, we want to direct most of our SPL energy toward our singers, but at the same time, away from the pickup patterns of our microphones. Of course, some of that energy is going to bleed into those pickup patterns, but we’ll want to limit that bleed as much as possible. Of course it is plausible to do like we always do and put them down on the floor, but if you have rigging capable of doing so, it can be helpful to locate our monitor speakers up above the choir. Side fills can work, but great care must be taken to not disperse that aforementioned SPL energy into our aforementioned microphone pickup patterns in that case.
Aim to Please
Aiming the speakers is very important, but choosing the right speakers from the outset is also important. Keeping the SPL energy under control is much easier using speakers that can confine their dispersion in a focused way. A good number of us use software to very carefully measure and adjust how energy is dispersed from our front of house speakers, but we can do just the same with monitor speakers and get that energy going where we want it. Similarly, we move Heaven and Earth to ensure that the output of our FOH speakers is as spectrally flat as we can make it. That is also helpful with monitor speakers — if for no other reason than making them behave in expected ways. The bumps in a less-than-flat response curve are going to be the first frequencies to start running, and flattening the curve will result in more predictable behavior. Related to that is the notion of ringing out our choir monitors. This item is very high on the list of important stuff we must do to accomplish good choir monitoring. It should go without saying that we should do this with our choir in place, as having a bunch of human bodies on the choir risers will have a substantial impact on how energy is dispersed across the frequency spectrum.
Another very important thing to consider in all this is what we choose to put through our choir monitors. As audio pros, our goal is almost always to simply give the listener what they want — monitor engineers make a career out of making musicians and vocalists happy. When the customer is a single person — like a guitar-strumming lead vocalist, for instance — we just ask them “what would you like in your monitors?” and then we give them that. But in the case of a choir, the “customer” might consist of 50-100 people. There’s an old saying — “a camel is a horse designed by committee” — and indeed, asking the entire choir for their monitor wish list is almost certain to be a fool’s errand — resulting in numerous contradictory requests — and virtually impossible to deliver. The best bet in this case is to appoint a spokesperson for the choir, and the obvious choice is the choir director. It’s reasonable to expect the person in that leadership role to work together with the members of the choir to present plausible (and effective) requests to our monitor engineer. This way, the engineer doesn’t suffer the confusing cacophony of singers each insisting on monitor mix requests to suit their own personal desires. The choir director sorts out the details and presents the request to the engineer. Of course, compromise is necessary in this case, but it’s the most preferable alternative.
A Little Education…
In order to help smooth out this process, I also recommend spending some time to educate the choir director on how monitoring works and what is — and what is not — possible. Help them understand concepts like gain before feedback, and help them figure out what elements need to be prominent in the monitor mix. As stated before, the point of monitoring is to give our listener frames of reference in both the time and pitch domains — help the director understand that rhythmic information from the musicians can be a helpful enhancement to their waving arms, and that a good solid pitch reference will help keep their choir tighter. (Hint: electronic keyboards aren’t typically susceptible to drifting pitch like guitars).
We should also help the director understand that only so much information can be jammed through the monitor pipeline before it becomes a dense, impenetrable mess, so let’s choose the stuff that will be most beneficial by way of helping keep the choir in tune and on time. And of course, the band is not the end of it. We do indeed want our singers to hear one another. Before there was ever any such thing as mics and monitors, we set choirs up in ways that helped them hear themselves and each other — in particular by lining them up in an arc. This practice helps us with monitoring in the obvious way, but also by reducing the number of the choir mics that need to appear in the monitor mix. If we have the basses way over on the left and the sopranos way over on the right, it would make sense to feed a bit more of the basses to the sopranos’ mix and vice-versa, as they are not adjacent to each other and would otherwise have a bit more trouble hearing each other.
The Bottom Line
Vocals, in particular, seem to benefit most from good monitoring practices — likely because human voices can be a little irregular compared with musical instruments, and aural guidance can help serve as guardrails to get them a bit more under control. Indeed, the notion of providing such help via good monitoring is every bit as legitimate with choirs as with singing individuals. Expending a little time and effort in this domain should reap rewards.
John McJunkin is an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University.
