How to Mic a Worship Band

This is the list that fits the large majority of churches with a band. It is deliberately conservative on drums and deliberately generous on spares, because the spare channels are what stop you replacing the console in two years.

Drums first, because they set the floor for everything. Four microphones, kick plus snare plus two overheads, covers the kit for almost every church, and the arguments for and against the seven-piece approach are in how to mic a drum kit in church. A kit produces 105 to 120 dBA at 3 feet with peaks near 130 dB, which means the drum microphones need the least gain on the console and the drums themselves dictate how quiet your room can ever be.

Bass and keys should go direct, always. A Radial Pro48 Active 48-Volt Compact Direct Box active box handles an active bass without loading down the pickup, and a stereo Radial ProD2 Passive 2 Channel Direct Box handles a keyboard cleanly. There is no acoustic argument for putting a microphone on a bass cabinet in a church: it adds 100 dBA of stage wash into every vocal microphone and gains nothing a direct box does not give you. The options are compared in best direct boxes for churches.

Electric guitar is the argument you will actually have. A Shure SM57 Pro XLR Dynamic Instrument Microphone an inch off the grille cloth, slightly off the dust cap, is the traditional answer and it works. It also requires the amplifier to be audible in the room at 95 to 110 dBA at 3 feet, which is the single largest driver of stage volume in most churches. An isolation cabinet or a modeller taken direct removes that entirely and is the answer more churches land on every year. The trade-offs are in microphone for an electric guitar amp.

Vocals are the easiest decision on the platform. A Shure SM58 Pro XLR Dynamic Vocal Microphone at $109.00 for backing vocals and a Shure BETA 58A Supercardioid Dynamic Vocal Microphone or AUDIX OM5 Hypercardioid Handheld Dynamic Vocal Microphone for Stage Singers for the lead is a combination that has worked in churches for decades, needs no phantom power, survives being dropped, and rejects the wedge behind it. The difference between the SM58 and the Beta 58A is real and small, and it is laid out in SM58 versus Beta 58A.

Count the monitor mixes for this band and you get eight: five instrumentalists, one shared mix for a pair of backing vocalists, one for the second pair and one for the drummer, with the worship leader always needing their own. Eight is the number that matters, because wireless in-ear systems stop being practical somewhere around six mixes. Every wireless in-ear transmitter occupies spectrum in the same crowded UHF band as your microphones, and eight in-ear channels plus six microphone channels is fourteen coordinated frequencies, which the wireless channel calculator will tell you is a serious ask in most metropolitan areas.

The alternative above six mixes is wired personal mixers. A Behringer POWERPLAY P16-M 16 Channel Digital Personal Mixer per musician at $209.00 fed from a Behringer POWERPLAY P16-D 16 Channel Digital ULTRANET Distributor distributor gives each player sixteen sources and their own control, uses one network cable, occupies no radio spectrum at all and costs less per position than a wireless in-ear system. The comparison is in wireless in-ears versus wired personal mixers and the counting is in the monitor mix calculator.

Whatever you choose, budget for it. Monitoring is roughly 9 percent of a church audio budget and it is the line most often deleted when the numbers get tight, which is a false economy: stage volume is a house mix problem, and a band that cannot hear itself will guarantee you a bad house mix no matter what you spend on loudspeakers. Work the whole allocation through the AV budget calculator.

Eighteen inputs means about eleven microphone stands, twenty XLR cables, four direct boxes and a stage box. That infrastructure runs about 10 percent of an audio budget and it is always under-budgeted. A six pack of On-Stage MSP7706 Euro Boom 6 Mic Stands w/Travel Bag (For Vocal and Instrument Microphones, Height-Adjustable, Rugged, Lightweight, Steel, Standard Threading, Folding Tripod, Durable, Black) boom stands at $174.22 covers most of the platform, with a couple of heavier On-Stage MS9701B+ Heavy-Duty Euro-Boom Mic Stand (Setup for Vocal and Instrument Microphones, Adjustable Height, Portable, Folding, Tripod Base, Rubber Feet, Steel and Zinc, 5/8″-27 Threading, Black) stands where a stand has to hold a boom out over a drum kit without tipping.

Buy more XLR cables than you think you need and buy them in a length that suits the platform. Multiple short cables daisy chained across a stage are the most common source of intermittent faults in a church, and an intermittent cable is far harder to diagnose on a Sunday than a dead one. A 16 channel stage snake such as the Hosa SH-16X4-50 Pro-Conex 16x4 Stage Box Snake - 50 foot tidies the runs to the booth and turns a twenty minute patch into a five minute one, which matters most for a portable setup that tears down every week.

Finally, label everything at both ends. It sounds trivial and it is the single highest return habit in church audio, because the person patching at 7:15 on a Sunday is frequently not the person who built the system.