Worshipping in a high school gymnasium on the weekends is a popular portable location for many churches. But the venue comes with its disadvantages – and in addition to the load in and tear down each week, audio quality can be complicated. David Faircloth is a contract audio engineer at Elevation Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“There’s not a lot of clarity in the room, and so we have to rely on other things to kind of pull that clarity out,” he explains. “We put drape all around the perimeter of it and we can fit around 500 seats inside of that draped-in area.”
“I think it gets you to an achievable product faster right off the gate, and that's great.” - David Faircloth, audio engineer, Elevation Church, Raleigh, NC
As part of a Church Production Road Test User Experience, Faircloth and the tech team at Elevation Church Raleigh tried a collection Shure’s new Nexadyne Dynamic Vocal Microphones to see if they would make a difference – and he says they did. “We had the wireless mics, the capsules, as well as some wired mics, and we had a really good experience,” Faircloth explains. “We noticed that there was a lot more clarity in the top end. It gave us a big advantage on clarity over what we were using previously.”
Elevation Worship Leader Meredith Eatmon agrees. “I definitely could tell a difference in this mic versus the one I was using before. Before I felt very muffled in my ears and my own mix, and when we switched to this new Shure capsule, it felt very clear, but still rounded out and didn't feel harsh or anything like that. I felt like, especially in my inner mix, I have a lot of clarity with it.”
Faircloth says, with their old mics, they’d spend a lot of time doing vocal checks trying to get the vocals just right for the room. But he says the Shure Nexadyne mics allowed him to do very minimal EQ work. “I think it gets you to an achievable product faster right off the gate, and that's great.”
To hear the rest of the interviews at Elation Church in Raleigh and see the Shure Nexadyne mics in action, watch this video.