Floral wire. Moleskin. Surgical tape. Toupee clips. Elastic bands. It’s either time for arts and crafts or for this year’s Christmas stage productions. If it’s the latter, rustle up your favorite lavalier and headset microphones and be prepared to find creative ways of putting them on people and for hiding them in scenery and props. It’s an annual task, and fortunately there are lots of resources out there to help.
As the RF environment everywhere becomes progressively trickier to manage, the ability to change frequencies when another wireless device intrudes on your mic’s space can save a performance.
For instance, Shure of Niles, Ill., has an excellent primer on the topic of microphone choice and placement in theatrical applications. It’s filled with useful insights: for instance, for best intelligibility results, place lav mics at the top of the chest, above the ear, or along the hairline; avoid placing the mic too high on the chest near the throat, because high frequencies can be blocked by the chin, which will cause the sound to be muffled and impede clarity. Also, it recommends, “Be sure to provide strain relief for the cable. When mounting a lavalier on the head, the cabling at the point at which the neck bends needs to be the most secure. Make sure there is slack or a sudden movement can pull the microphone out of place.”
Rutherford, N.J.-based Masque Sound, a leading audio systems and services providers for Broadway shows and other theatrical productions, has some great information on its website that will help church theater-sound A2s work with costumes. While there are plenty of opportunities for hiding lavs, bodypack transmitters and cabling in stage wardrobe (and the flowing robes of Christmas productions can make that even easier), based on an actor’s, director’s, or wardrobe issues, sometimes positioning has to be less than traditional. “One such placement is over the ear, which relies on the actor’s cheekbone for resonance instead of the forehead/sinus cavity,” Masque’s webpage suggests. “The microphone will peek out an inch or two beyond the ear canal and follow the cheekbone line. If an actor’s costume wardrobe allows, mic placement may be achieved through eyeglass, hat, and lapel mounts, among others.”
New Tricks
But while the basics of the art and craft of microphone placement haven’t substantially changed, there are always a few tips, tricks and new wrinkles that someone has up their sleeve (which can also be a great place to hide some cabling). And technology has also changed, impacting church theatrical productions in ways positive and otherwise. For example, Ron Cook, who spent 15 years as the chief audio engineer at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., before going freelance with his own company, Split The Difference Audio LLC, points out that not only have large-scale video walls become increasingly part of the scenery and backdrops of productions, but that high-definition video is letting audiences pick out details on stage that weren’t intended to be seen, like microphones. Cook says he likes headsets because they are two-way systems that let actors speak and be spoken to, but that when tiny lavs are called for to stay out of the video picture, he’ll add an equally small interruptible foldback (IFB) earpiece to the mix. As video has become bigger and more detailed, that solution gets implemented more and more often.“
Clear-Com IFB Ear Set.
The IFB earpiece is a great way to be able to give actors cues, as well as help them hear everything else that’s happening on stage,” Cook explains. “When you’re getting a lot of close-ups from the stage onto the video screens, the headset can become a bit too obvious. I prefer them because you get the best gain before feedback from them, because the capsule can be positioned very close to the actor’s mouth. But as the video gets bigger, the headset really stands out and you have to go to a lav. An IFB earpiece adds the listening aspect that you lose when you can’t use a headset.”
Better Bodypacks
One of the advances in wireless-microphone technology in recent years has been the ability to remotely control a lot of their functions. New bodypack systems allow A1s and A2s to monitor battery strength, turn transmitters on and off to better conserve battery life, and perhaps most critically these days to quickly switch radio frequencies. As the RF environment everywhere becomes progressively trickier to manage (see sidebar “A New Wireless Landscape This Christmas”), the ability to change frequencies when another wireless device intrudes on your mic’s space can save a performance. Cook used Shure’s Axient wireless system when filling in as the A1 for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit earlier this year, a live event that was simulcast in HD from the Willow Creek campus to more than 600 satellite locations nationwide. “We didn’t need to suddenly change frequencies during the event, fortunately,” he says, “but the possibility for that grows stronger every day,” as consumer wireless companies like T-Mobile and Verizon “light up” their newly acquired RF spectrum. Cook also likes how the major wireless microphone manufacturers provide user-friendly software, such as Shure’s Workbench program, that makes it easier for entities like houses of worship to do their own frequency management.
The Band’s All Here
Putting live music together on the stage with theatrical productions can be an effective strategy for Christmas shows. But that also means potentially a lot of open microphones on stage at the same time. A typical response to that situation might be to choose highly directional microphones for the music, or even to implement acoustical barriers, like gobos, in between the band and the actors, or even between individual musicians, in order to maintain control over the sound.
That could be a mistake, says Bryce Boynton, audio director at the Flatirons Church in the Denver area. “If you make control of every sound element your goal, you’ll be sacrificing sound quality, because the microphones that give you the best isolation usually don’t also give the best frequency response,” he explains. Instead, he advises, pick good microphones that offer a useful balance of good frequency response and off-axis rejection—he chooses from an inventory heavy with DPA and Lectrosonics microphones—and then rely on the talent of the musicians to group and balance themselves on stage, which is how he approached the church’s shift away from its characteristically loud rock music to an acoustic band for last year’s Christmas production. Then, he suggests, listen to the bleed between instrument microphones and let that become a kind of sonic grout that helps hold the sound together. During services, good musicians intuitively understand how to pull back on volume during spoken-word passages, and that same ability can be applied to theatrical productions. “Don’t try to control the sound through the mix,” Boynton cautions. “Don’t fight the musicians—that’s a losing battle. Instead, look at the production through a wide lens first: what do you want the overall sound to feel like? What’s happening on stage that we want to amplify through technology?” Audiences have come to expect better sound for everything, and that includes Christmas productions. A little extra effort and some awareness about how technology and the RF environment have changed recently will help make this year’s productions memorable.
Sidebar: A New Wireless Landscape This Christmas
Churches putting on Christmas productions this year will face a very different landscape when it come to their wireless microphone operations. A lengthy and complex Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-managed reverse auction of RF spectrum concluded earlier this year. It took most of the spectrum in the 600-MHz range—long considered prime wireless real estate because of that frequency range’s ease and distance of propagation—away from traditional wireless users, including broadcasters and live-event producers and sold it to mobile wireless bidders such as T-Mobile and Verizon, who will use their newly acquired spectrum to expand their consumer wireless networks.
… rely on the talent of the musicians to group and balance themselves on stage, then listen to the bleed between instrument microphones and let that become a kind of sonic grout that helps hold the sound together.
This large shift in RF spectrum availability will further constrain wireless microphone systems users, including houses of worship, who have come to rely on wireless audio not only for event production but for weekly services and even everyday applications. Specifically, wireless microphone users now have to vacate the RF regions above 608 MH; however, within that range are two “guard bands” that can be accessed—between 614 MHz and 617 MHz, and 653 MHz and 663 MHz—by unlicensed wireless users, as long as frequency coordination is applied. There will still be substantial RF spectrum available to both licensed and unlicensed wireless-mic users—portions of the 169-172 MHz band, the 900 MHz band, the 1435-1525-MHz band, and the 7 GHz band for the former; and the 902-928-MHz band, the 1920-1930-MHz band, and the 2.4-GHz band, among others, for the latter.
One of the most critical tenets of the post-auction landscape is the stipulation that wireless used would have up 39 months to make their transitions out of the 600-MHz range. It’s a window that many wireless systems manufacturers and retailers emphasized to prompt users to start transitioning. However, less well communicated was the FCC’s further stipulation that, “In particular, wireless microphone users must cease operation in frequencies in any areas where a 600-MHz service licensee has commenced their operation or is conducting its first field application testing.” Within weeks of the end of the auction, T-Mobile began aggressively “lighting up” its newly acquired spectrum, catching many wireless users off guard.“
The 39-month window was misleading,” says James Stoffo, longtime frequency coordinator for the NFL and other sports leagues, and now CTO of Radio Active Designs (RAD), an RF consultancy. “There was no way companies like cellular phone providers were going to spend $20 billion on spectrum and then let it sit there for over three years. People didn’t read the fine print.”
Stoffo says he’s pleasantly surprised at how solicitous T-Mobile has been in consulting with local licensed legacy RF users ahead of firing up their signals in the 600-MHz range. Still, he says, “The clock is ticking.” Wireless users need to make decisions as soon as possible regarding which new wireless systems they’ll be buying, and immediately in the largest cities where RF density is the greatest and cellular service highly competitive (Verizon is not far behind T-Mobile in this regard). Shure, Sennheiser and other brands have already announced rebates and other sales incentives. An even greater incentive, however, might be the FCC’s penalties for that kind of interference: fines of $10,000 per day per channel. That, Stoffo adds, helps put the cost of new wireless microphone systems into perspective.
