Choir Mic Techniques with Earthworks Audio

[00:00:00] Right now, let's hear about mic techniques with Earthworks Audio. On today's segment, we talk about the five levels of capturing choir sound. Joining us in this discussion is the marketing manager for Earthworks Audio, Nick Canovas. Nick, my solution for choir micing is to just not even have a choir. Get rid of them and just have band and vocals. But I must admit, that is taking the easy way out. So if I'm looking for a great choir micing solution,

[00:00:27] I hear Earthworks Audio has microphones that can really bring a choir back to life. We absolutely do. Bold strategy, too, of not having a choir. I might take you up on that at some point. Yeah, it's like, no choir, no problem, right? But yep, all fun aside, it's true. A lot of churches, you know, they don't have to have a choir. They have contemporary bands and things of that nature. But some churches, the choir's the thing. That's what they have to have, and that's what they rely on.

[00:00:55] So how does Earthworks resolve the choir micing problem? Well, first, it comes down to recognizing the core issue at hand, which is the fact that micing a choir can be quite difficult. You know, you've got a lot of different voices in one space. You have to deal with the acoustics of the space itself. And just finding a microphone that can solve that issue for you of just making your choir sound as rich and as full and as beautiful as it should, while taking into account the aspects of the space that you're in,

[00:01:24] it's a lot to ask of any piece of gear. Earthworks has our flagship choir micing system, the Flexwand FW730. And that's really taken off in Houses of Worship. It's a fully integrated boom stand system that captures choirs effortlessly. You throw three of these on your choir of like 20, 30, 40 people, and you're going to be getting a brilliant and most importantly, a unified sound.

[00:01:51] The generous polar pattern means that you're not getting sound that is just focusing on one singer that's right in front of the microphone. It's generous. It's going to give you that rich blended sound that you're looking for. And to dive into this further, we think about choir micing as something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, though we call it the hierarchy of choir micing needs. So at the first level, the bottom level, you have simply avoiding bad things.

[00:02:20] So that's no distortion. That's no feedback. That's no harshness. That's nothing that would actively cause a listener who doesn't know anything about audio to like wince or to think like, oh, there was an issue there. What was going on? So that's level one. Level two is maintaining control, which is just simply, you know, you have a firm grasp on your mix. There may not necessarily be anything fancy about it, but at the very least, you don't have any issues with it. Here, your main tools and what you're going to be using to get to this level are mic placement,

[00:02:50] which is key in any situation, but especially with micing a choir. And of course, any sort of basic signal processing that you throw on at first. So that might be EQ, compression, anything like that. The third level is intelligibility. So at level two, you have a sound that is passable and you have your choir that's being heard. But what are they saying? What are the words that they're trying to get across? What's the meaning that they're trying to convey to the audience? And that's what level three is all about. You want the words to actually be intelligible.

[00:03:20] And in tandem with that as well, you want the voices to blend together in a tangible way. You don't want one singer or a handful of singers just poking out in the mix. You want something that is unified. You want a body of voices coming together as one. And that's where level three is going to get you. So yeah, you also want your choir to blend with the system, right? You don't want it to stick out like here's these people sitting over here and then the band over here. You want it to blend so it feels natural between the speakers and what's happening on the platform, right, Nick?

[00:03:50] Absolutely. And that's where the fourth level of this pyramid comes into play, which is presence. You know, a lot of people when they're micing choirs, their only goal is just to get something that's decent. Like they set up the mics, the choir sounds fine. It gets them up to level three of this pyramid. But what we try to do with our choir micing solutions is make it so that getting to that third level is instantaneous.

[00:04:11] You set up the microphones and they already bring you to that level so that you then can really spend your time not on setting up and not on trying to just get a passable sound, but to really bring out the artistry in your choir and to really create an experience that is second to none for your audience. And so, yeah, level four is presence. That idea of, you know, you want to make the sound bigger, but not necessarily louder.

[00:04:37] You really want to master that blend so that the PA and the choir almost become one. And the idea that there's technology present really fades away. And it really becomes about that one-to-one connection with the audience and the ensemble. And that's where we get to level five, which is just emphasizing art and creativity. You are now mixing and capturing sound at a point where you can fully focus on bringing out everything that your choir is giving you and really bringing out that sound.

[00:05:06] So any sort of signal processing that you're doing is not done for corrective purposes. It's really done to enhance creativity. And that's what our tools, that's what our choir making solutions are meant to do. They're meant to get you to that point where you're really delving into the creativity, not only for yourself as an engineer, but for your congregation as well. Because when that process is made easier, that's going to make their lives easier. And then they get to focus on their craft as well.

[00:05:32] And the end result is just an incredible choir sound for your audience. So you talked a little bit about the FW730. We're looking at it right here. It's a beautiful microphone. But talk to us a little bit about the C30 and the P30. What's the difference between that and the FW730? Absolutely. So the use case is the primary difference. The C30 is meant for hanging installations. So if you want a choir mic, but you don't want the integrated boom stand that the FlexWand offers,

[00:06:00] the C30 comes with an included 30-foot Canary star quad cable that you can hang from the ceiling. It's a very easy solution. No difficulty in setting it up. And then the P30 is if you want that same sound from the C30 and the FlexWands, but you want it in a more conventional microphone setup that comes with an XLR port. So if you want more flexibility in how you use the microphone, maybe you want a choir microphone that can also work for capturing instruments, or even the podium if you wanted to.

[00:06:29] If you really want something that is flexible and all around an excellent mic, the P30 is the mic for you. For more information on Earthworks Audio, go to earthworksaudio.com. They make choir micing simple. earthworksaudio.com.