It's a little difficult to provide accurate advice not knowing the size of the venues you need to cover, the size of your budget, and the type of music you sing.  I'm going to assume that you are talking about small to medium-size spaces, a modest budget (under $2000), and that  the group is not primarily a vocal jazz ensemble.  Two or three overhead condenser mics of decent quality (ie: audio-technica) should work fine.  Consider a small passive mixing board with a couple of powered speakers  --  it's an easy set-up, and they usually have reasonably good fidelity.  You might do well with Behringer, or, if you have a little more $$, Mackie makes decent quality equipment for the money.  As far as monitors are concerned, i wouldn't believe everything Fender tells you.  The only speakers I have seen that don't feed back when placed behind the singers are the Bose "Towers".  They're pricey, though.  You're most likely better off with a couple of "wedge" monitors that are placed on the floor facing up toward the singers.  

 

There's a great amount of information available on the internet (including reviews) that will educate you before you actually shop.  Good luck.

 

 

Peace,

Jim 

 

 

James Lunsford

Director of Choirs

The Latin School of Chicago

jlunsford(a)latinschool.or

Hi again, Carol. I'm too many years out of working with a fully-amplified show to give you specific advice, and Jim's suggestions should be very helpful. However, the basics never change, and there are basic decisions you have to make before you go shopping for equipment.

 

1. Individual mics, several mic stand locations, or some kind of general overall miking? Individual mics can get pretty expensive for a group like yours, and definitely require active mixing by a sound person who knows what s/he's doing. Mic stands--say maybe 5 in your case--in a general floor pattern so that several singers can group around each one (which is what I did with my women's show group) or a few more in fixed locations (which I did with my mixed show group with usually 2 on a mic) can work well, and each mic can be taken off the stand by a soloist. General area miking is least satisfactory (depending on what you use for accompaniment, of course) and most subject to feedback because the mics have to be turned up higher and cannot be as directional.

 

2. Wireless or wired mics? Wireless can get expensive very fast. The ones our community musical theater company uses run about $350 EACH, and each one needs both a body pack and a receiver, with each set on a different frequency. And the Federal allocations of those frequencies has just changed, so you'd need professional advice on this. Wired mics present lots of cables that have to be carefully choreographed so people don't trip over them or get tangled up in them. With my mixed show group we used 11 wired mics on stands on the stage set, plus two wireless solo mics downstage left and right.

3. High impedance or low impedance mics? DEFINITELY low impedance, no question. High impedance mics present all kinds of problems you don't want or need, and can be identified by the fact that their cables end in quarter inch phone plugs. Low impedance mics use a 3-pin XLR connector, BUT you have to make sure your mixing board has the right kind of inputs.

4. Dynamic or condenser mics? The care and feeding of dynamic mics is much easier, and some of them can be used to drive nails! They don't need special wiring or phantom power, and they're available in a wide range of pickup patterns. But most of them are designed for hand-held close use and have a "proximity effect" bass boost that's good for solo voices. They also have a more limited frequency range. Condenser mics are much higher fidelity, and there are models designed for hand-held use that are much less fragile than the older ones used to be, but they require power (either internal batteries, which can get expensive, or power fed down the mic cables from the mixing board, which must be capable of providing that "phantom" power. And any bad solder joints or damaged cables will produce ugly pops through your sound system. With my mixed show group we used AKG hand-held wired condenser mics that I loved the sound of, and our two solo mics were battery-powered wireless mics.

5. Switched mics or unswitched mics? In other words, should you trust your singers to know when to turn their mics on or off, or should you trust your sound tech? It's a tossup! We always disabled the switches on our mics.

6. Amplifier? You can get mixing boards with built-in amplifiers, and they can work well if they have enough power. (You never want to approach the limit of your amplifier power; you want them to loaf along without any distortion!) You can also get powered speakers, as Jim mentioned, which are also fine if they have enough power, but the disadvantage there is that you're sending very low-level signals to the speakers which can invite interference. Most professional and semi-pro setups use very high powered separate amps, but that then gets you into questions of electronic knowledge and troubleshooting. It's really a tossup, and you might do just fine with a simpler setup.

7. Monitors, part 1: You need to be able to create a separate monitor mix, which can sometimes be part of your basic mixing board and for large setups requires a separate mixing board. Just feeding the same thing to your monitor speakers that you feed to your house speakers (called "foldback") is pretty primitive. Which means you ALSO need a separate amplifier for your monitors. Or you can use half of a stereo amp for monitors and the other half for house speakers.

8. Monitors, part 2: There's good and bad about using monitor speakers in the first place. The idea is that the performers need to hear themselves. In a rock band with a sound pressure level on stage above 130 dB monitors are absolutely essential. For a vocal group without excessively loud accompaniment, they might not be. And there's a danger that the singers will start self-mixing according to what they hear on the monitors, which might NOT be what the audience hears on the house speakers, especially if they are not used to them. Monitors also increase the danger of feedback, and the monitor mix really needs to be "rung out" using a multi-band graphic equalizer to minimize that problem.

9. House speakers? Jim's exactly right that you can't design one system that fits every conceivable situation, but it would be foolish to purchase equipment suitable for a coliseum if most of your shows are in hotel ballrooms. Relatively small, relatively efficient, and relatively good quality speakers are available from a number of makers. (A number of years ago I would have recommended Peavey, but these things change over time.) What you have to make sure of is that (a) the speakers are full-range and high quality; (b) they are sturdy!; (c) they are light enough that two of your women can carry them and three can set them up on their stands; and (d) SOMEBODY has responsibility for double and triple checking every connection to make sure the patching is right!

10. If you're doing shows now and are satisfied with an acoustic sound, consider whether you really WANT or NEED to go amplified in the first place. If you just feel that you need a little reinforcement in larger rooms, a very minimal setup (which can probably be purchased as a package from several manufacturers) might be all you need, depending on the house equipment and technicians in larger venues. My women's Sweet Adelines chorus NEVER used amplification, and if we had it would simply have been 1 or 2 mics placed in front, on either side of me, to give a little reinforcement. My mixed show group ALWAYS used amplification, because with a hot, 12-piece showband behind us there was really no choice!

11. Once you've talked through the basic choices and make the basic decisions, find a professional sound company to work with. They'll know how to match all the components so they work well together, and you won't pay much more or any more buying equipment from them than you will from anyone else, plus they'll then have an incentive to keep it working and keep you happy!

All the best,
John

P.S.  12.  Pickup patterns?  (Almost forgot!)  The typical pattern is "cardioid" (heart-shaped, which simply means that one end of the mic picks up the most sound and the other end represses it).  That's the best way to avoid feedback, being careful to keep the "hot" end of the mic never pointing directly toward a speaker (which is why you NEVER put speakers BEHIND your singers!!!).  "Super"-cardioid or "hyper"-cardioid you don't want; those are for rock singers because they reject more of the stage noise.  But typical body-pack wireless mics are "omnidirectional" rather than directional, and they REALLY invite feedback.  I would advise avoiding those at all costs, and those include the clip-on kind of mic that newscasters use.  (They don't have to worry about feedback.)