Best Mic for Filming Live Singing

[hellohopes]

Hi there

I'm going to be filming a lot of live singing performances and I'm wondering what the best way to record the sound for this is?

For example, should I buy a load of headset mic's for the singers... and then where should these feed into? Or is there a better way?

My budget is not very big but I need the sound to be as high quality and professional as possible. Ideally I'd want them in a recording studio, but that's not practical for many of the upcoming shoots.

I'm completely clueless about this I'm afraid, so go easy! I'll be using Canon 5D/7D/500D.

 

[Steenamaroo]

Hi and welcome.
Tell us more about your project.
How many singers will there be at any given time. Is it one at a time or what?
What about visuals. Does it matter if there's a mic in their face?

I'm not 100% certain about the possiblities of mics into the canon directly; I'll leave that to someone else.

Assuming it's not ideal though, you could set up a small usb audio interface, or handheld recorder with XLR input, and a humble mic like a 58 or nt1a and get a great sound.

What's the environment like acoustically? Is it a big echoey hall, a small bassy room?
Are you interested in post processing, or do you just want a straight-up raw recording?
Are you dealing with a backing track or is this just solo vox?

 

[hellohopes]

Hello, and thank you for replying!

There will be between 8-12 young singers, sometimes doing solos and sometimes all together. No, it wouldn't matter if you could see the mic, but there's lots of dancing so it would have to be a headset, not handheld.

An idea I've come up with in the last few minutes is having a makeshift recording studio. So I can record their vocals (in the space where they're performing) whilst they listen to the music through headphones. That way it can be fiddled with in post, but hopefully still have a 'live' quality.

Is there a cost effective way of doing this where the vocals could be fed into a computer, and they can listen to both the backing music AND their own voice through headphones while they're singing?

I'm so new to the music scene (I'm in filmmaking) so the above might seem obvious, but not to me!! But that would be ideal, so if there's any software or equipment I can buy to achieve that then that would be perfect.

 

[Bobbsy]

Well, you need to have a think about priorities, methodology and budget.

The first big decision is whether you want to capture the sound live as they dance or pre record it and have them mime to it while performing. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

However, being realistic, unless you have a huge budget you're not going to have 12 headset radio mics and 12 channels of wireless in ear monitors.

This leaves you with a couple of options:

-the pre record and mime route which will probably yield the best quality but is hard for amateurs to do convincingly, or

-basic area miking (probably an X-Y stereo pair or maybe a couple of PCC/PZM mics on the floor) which will preserve the live quality but also will depend hugely on the acoustics of your recording space.

The gear you'd need for these solutions is fairly different so that's something to decide before we go into more detail.

Something to consider: if you can live with the pre recording, you can shoot each number several times from different angles, giving you lots more editing options and making the end result look more professional.

 

[hellohopes]

Well, you need to have a think about priorities, methodology and budget.

The first big decision is whether you want to capture the sound live as they dance or pre record it and have them mime to it while performing. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

However, being realistic, unless you have a huge budget you're not going to have 12 headset radio mics and 12 channels of wireless in ear monitors.

This leaves you with a couple of options:

-the pre record and mime route which will probably yield the best quality but is hard for amateurs to do convincingly, or

-basic area miking (probably an X-Y stereo pair or maybe a couple of PCC/PZM mics on the floor) which will preserve the live quality but also will depend hugely on the acoustics of your recording space.

The gear you'd need for these solutions is fairly different so that's something to decide before we go into more detail.

Something to consider: if you can live with the pre recording, you can shoot each number several times from different angles, giving you lots more editing options and making the end result look more professional.

The pre-record is what we've been doing up until now as - yes - we film multicamera productions cutting between lots of different shots. We work with very accomplished young performers who sing along with the pre-recorded version, so lip-syncing is not a problem.

We've used a recording studio in the past, but our new base does not have a built in recording studio. But yes, if we can continue with pre-record and mime by setting up a makeshift recording system on set, this would be absolutely ideal..... I just have no idea what it is I need to do this!