Church miking

[Brett Sheaffer]

Hey, Bart.

Our church choir and band just performed your friend Mr. Jernigan's musical "We Will Worship" yesterday (good stuff!), and some sound balancing/recording issues brought a question to my mind:

Is there a small mixer or pre-amp or something available for me as a drummer which would allow me to use multiple microphones on the drums and yet send only one cord to the house soundboard?

Right now we only have one available "in" on the board, and so I'm stuck with one overhead mike for my set and auxilliary percussion.  In the long term, we will be getting a second soundboard for just the praise team and band, but for now I'd like to at least add the bass drum to the sound mix.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Brett

[Bart Elliott]

In my opinion, one of the best boards for the money is going to be the Mackie mixer.

All you need is a board that has enough internal mic-pres to handle your drums. You submix them down to one output and send that to your house board.

I don't know how big your drumset is, or how many mics you have, but generally speaking a board with 8 mic-pres should work great for you.

This would give you enough to mic the following:

• Kick Drum
• Snare Drum
• HiHat
• Tom1
• Tom 2
• Tom 3
• Overhead (left)
• Overhead (right)

If you have four Tom Toms and you want to mic those, you could sacrifice on of the overhead mics ... or perhaps the HiHat mic. You have to be the judge on that ... based on the room, the mics, and your set-up.

Whatever board you get, make sure that it is equipped with Phantom Power ... for your condenser mics (ie. Overheads, etc).

Also, don't be opposed to using two small boards, like the Mackie 1202 VLZ (or the like). These have four mic-pres, but you could put two boards together to make eight mic-pres. You would then need to run the output of one board into a input channel on the second board, then run the main mix (1 MONO channel in your case) to the house board. It's kind of a "poor boy" way of doing things, but it works, and I've done on MANY occasions.

Hope this helps get you started.