Choir mics

I have a new favorite mic for choirs.

Recently, I have been dealing with a church that has a decent sized choir but they sing primarily with tracks. They want a decent amount of monitor thrown back at them (unfortunately, not unusual) plus they don't project a lot of volume in their singing. Part of this is due to the arrangement of being spread out and standing in straight lines vs. in a choral arrangement. So even with all of my experience in feedback control, I wasn't getting quite the level that I needed to make the pastor happy. Due to the stage design, the pastor didn't want to use hanging mics either.

I started looking at all of the options that I could find out about, calling friends and such. Throughout this, I heard that a large church of the same denomination of this church had done a mic shootout and had settled on the Earthworks SR series hypercardiod mics. Knowing that it would be an easier sell to this church, I thought that I would take a serious look at these mics.

Well, after looking a many polar plots it became obvious that the cool feature of the the earthworks hyper mics is that they basically have a cardiod front pattern with the hyper pattern on the back side. So really wide front pickup but great rejection on the back. Their rejection is fairly even across the frequency spectrum which most of the smaller mics don't have.

Here's the kicker that Earthworks doesn't want you to know. They have a series called the Flex series, which is designed for podium purposes. Upon looking at the costs of their mics, I noticed that the flex series is priced almost half of the SR series. This is more than likely due to the SR series picking up to 30Khz (but what PA speaker can adequately reproduce and throw such high freq's?) Also, the flex series has an option called "stiff center" that isn't really noted on the site. The stiff center only had a short gooseneck section then a straight tube followed by a goose section at the mic head.

So here's what I ended up getting. I bought the Earthworks FM720/HC stiff center. I bought the 27" version so that I don't use a boom arm on the mic stand. I let the 27" of the mic due the reach out. It looks actually very nice as noted by the pastor and his wife.

As I stated at the top, I now have a new favorite choir mic. These things performed extremely. During rehearsal, I could barely hear the choir director talk since she was standing within 6 feet of backside of the mic. Yet, it felt like I could hear the choir breathing - got them to about 85dBspl at FOH. The church is in heaven with the performance of their choir now. Plus the money that I saved them by finding the flex series.

I would like to thank the guys at Earthworks for helping me in this venture especially Dennis.