How many boundary mics does it take...?

[missilsetti]

Hello everyone,

 

I am new here and I'm desperately looking for a bit of advice for this show my musical theatre society is putting on.

We have a cast of 10 people and we'll be performing in a lecture theatre-style room with around 150 seats. We just got this funds to buy microphones and I was trying to figure out what would be more effective to buy given also our limited budget (£200 -£250 max). The situation is the following:

* each person is the cast has a lead role at a certain point - and we're all mostly on stage all the time so there's not much chance of swapping lapel mics among us

* we'd like to invest those money into something that could be useful even for further productions which might have a bigger cast

* it will be a quite danced show

 

For all these reasons I thought that possibly getting some boundary mics would be the best way to go, also cause being a small venue there isn't *too much* need of amplifying the voice though it would definitely sound better if we do.

 

How many boundary mics do you think should we get and do you have any recommendation for something that could fit in our budget? I've read in some previous post about boundary mics on CPC and had a look at those but being no expert I'm really not sure which one would suit this particular situation :)

 

Thank you all very much!! :)

[timsabre]

Probably the best answer is don't buy any, in a "lecture theatre style room" you will struggle to get noticeable amplification before you run into feedback problems.

You might be able to wangle a deal to hire 10 lapel radios for £250 if it's just for a few days - I know this doesn't give you something to use for future productions but you'd probably be wasting money buying boundary mics.

 

But to give a good answer other questions need asking - what is the PA system like? How are the speakers positioned relative to the acting area? Can you get hold of a good sound engineer to operate the system? cos you'll need one with either boundary mics or lapels.

[sam.spoons]

Tim's pretty much nailed it.

 

OTOH if you really must, the only way you have a hope of making a difference is by making the mics a feature and having stand mounted or preferably handheld wired mics for the actors to use when they are the principle singers/s. For some shows this could work well but would need blocking in at a very early stage of rehearsals. For a dance show you'd need to separate the dancers and singers (as used to be the norm back in the day) so the singers sing and the dancers dance but nobody does both at the same time. If you can't do this then it's back to what Tim says.

[Pete Alcock]

Missiletti,

 

You might get some benefit from boundary mics - it really depends on how good the PA system is in the venue, and where the speakers are positioned relative to your cast and the mic(s). If you could supply some details about what the system is (speakers, desk, whether there's a graphic eq available), we could make a better asessment of whether it's likely to work, or be a waste of money.

 

Whatever, if you do go for boundary mics, get good ones. Cheap ones will sound dreadful and you'll just get a mess of howling feedback. Crown PCC160 mics are now available in the UK under the Bartlett brand, from Paul Need (10 out of 10 productions) and he's occasionally on this forum. I have a couple of them and have found them very useful in certain situations. They will lift spoken word very well, provided the system and room acoustics are favourable. They won't get weak singing voices above a loud band though!

 

CPC do sell some boundary layer mics. They're OK for picking up sounds in a conference room, but to stand a chance in a live sound environment, you need the proper thing.

 

More info and we'll be able to give more help.

 

PA.

[paulears]

I've bought many of the CPC microphones, and they have quite a few rather good ones - BUT - as TimS said,they may well be hopeless for your space. They're not magic, but just a way of capturing a significant 'wedge' of sound in front of them, if you pick the cardioid type, and not the omni. The trouble with a fairly open space is that while they capture a lot, the gain before feedback is surprisingly poor. With a pros style theatre with the PA on the audience side, and PCC type boundary mics facing the opposite way, you get a bit more, but still not a lot. In a space where the PA can be heard everywhere, then the mics will hear the PA too, plus of course any musicians you have. The real snag is that musical theatre is now a very wide genre, and your idea can work well for perhaps the Sound of Music, where you have twenty odd nuns all singing, or even something like West Side Story, where there are many chorus numbers with keen singers, and just a few who can sing loudly as principals. It gets tricky as soon as you start to think about juke box musicals, or those that need LOUD voices from quiet performers. If you use tracks, and have weak voices, then the tracks have to be very low - and this is where people suddenly think spending a few quid will solve the problem, but the real problem is that a few quid rarely works! Think about the West End. How many do NOT use radio mics, and why not? Small societies assume they can do the same show with acoustic style performances. It rarely works.

 

If you provide some specifics, maybe we can help. What is the show, is there a band and if there is, what makeup is it - and lastly, can the cast really sing in the right style.

[missilsetti]

Hi everyone thanks you all for the replies! I hope to cover everything you asked with this - if I forgot any info let me know :) So:

 

*it's going to be a few songs from Chicago mostly.

*We have backing tracks and not a live band

*this link shows how the lecture theatre looks like. The Speakers are on the ceiling which is not too low as you can see. The place is supposed to have a very good acoustic, it won a few awards for architectural stuff - don't know more than that specifically

*we will be getting a mixer ourself, I don't think that there's anything we could use in the theatre already.

*using all the money for hiring stuff is not really an option cause we got the fund specifically for buying equipment and we won't see any other funds for a long time :P

 

Hope that covers all!

[timsabre]

Oooo... pretty! But you shouldn't believe architects guff, with speakers distributed all over the ceiling like that, boundary mics really will have feedback problems. It'll be tricky for sound because if you don't use mics and still put your tracks through those speakers the people at the back will just hear the track. If it was me I think I'd put up a small pa at the front and play the tracks through that at a volume which balances with the unamplified singing - it doesn't look like a big room. Or you need to play pass the mic somehow. Don't see how it will work otherwise.

[paulears]

Ooh! Great for a lecture theatre, but those celing speakers are going to wreck any ideas you have to use boundary mics. Realistically, you need a PA, with monitors that aim at the singers. Chicago is going to be very tricky without proper miking. Think about All That Jazz, it goes from quiet husky sexy chest voice, and if as many do, you stage it with a load of girls sitting on backwards facing chairs, then the volume needs to get the voice over the general noise of people and chairs. Stuff like Cell Block Tango has lots of people singing and if any are quiet, how do you get them over the others and the track.

 

Frankly, with next to nothing in the budget, and no hire option, you are stuffed. If the cast can sing and dance at the same time, with a bit of potency, then your PA just has to provide the music for them. If any are weak, you have real problems.

 

I suspect in that space, your idea of boundaries (and personally, the room to me says 3 of them) just won't give you much volume at all.

[MarkPAman]

You say lecture theatre - is that what it normally is? What is the usual way of feeding the speakers? If it's a well positioned lav clipped to a lecturers jacket & any other sound comes from the PowerPoint PC then boundary mics will be impossible to use in any way that helps.

[Andrew C]

It gets worse. Another pic

 

About the only real suggestion I'd make is to get some speakers behind the cast, turn them down to a level that the cast can be heard over them. And get the cast to SING OUT.

[Pete Alcock]

One suggestion: Find out who runs the technical facilities in the lecture theatre, and see if they can rig a small speaker or two from the lighting bar, pointing down at the audience. From the picture you've supplied, it looks like it's in roughtly the right position. Once you've got an audience in, then I think you might have a chance with just 1 or 2 boundary mics at the front edge of the stage. That's what I'd try anyway.

 

I say get one of the tecchie crew to do it, because there's special kit and techniques required for suspending things (H&S etc. etc.)

 

Alternatively, is there another venue you can use...?

 

PA

[paulears]

Am I the only one that wonders if architectural awards are handed out on the same basis as oscars and brit awards. I hate the roof personally, love the walls, but surely the design requirements for decent sound in a lecture theatre hardly sit well with hard surfaces and a pitched roof. It cites the acoustics as being good for recitals AND lectures because of the oak surfaces. I can 'hear' the recital room, but not a nice room for reflections.

 

I fear Andrew's solution may be the only one. Forget any form of distant miking, it's natural acoustic or not!

[Jevans]

Oxford is full of colleges which pretty much all have a lecture room somewhere that they grandly term a "theatre". Pretty much only the O'Reilly Theatre, Keble, can actually be described as such, and from my experiences there I would say that perhaps the answer is perhaps actually more draping to control the accoustic where needed, rather than adding more amplification. I have never been in the Shulman, but certainly in the O'Reilly the first thing we do when doing any musical is drape all of the walls and unused sections of the balcony, as we have many concrete walls; doing that goes a long way to giving a usable acoustic. I suspect the glass wall at the back and the stone at the sides may present similar issues for you.

 

There will probably be no dedicated crew for the lecture theatre and so it is unlikely you're going to be able to rig any extra speakers or move the existing ones - like most colleges the AV install is probably totally integrated behind a Crestron controller and there's no access to audio/speaker patch points to put anything else in - so as you say there's probably not a mixer in there, but then there's probably also nowhere you could actually plug it in.

 

Unfortunately the student tech society doesn't own any boundry mics, speakers or draping that you could use; but I'll ask around my contacts to see if anyone's been there.

 

One other thing you may also wish to check is the lectern - in many colleges it's not removable!

[w/robe]

To be fair to the architects it is a lecture theatre and it shouldn't come as a surprise that it is about as suitable for staging a musical as an operating theatre.

While the best use of your money to improve sound quality may well be a drape system I would hope that, if you have a decent director/choreographer, they already have plans for having some of the cast outside.

[Jivemaster]

My idea of best plan is to have everything recorded on one track all balanced, and play this to the audience with some attempt at miming by the cast. You make the track close miked to catch all the nuances of voice that may well be lost in a full song and dance performance. It's HARD to breathe well for singing when you are dancing hard. OK if you have some strong performers than let them do both song and dance, but if projecting to 150 seats is too hard they are NOT good performers.