Recommend a mic

[Joshualangman]

Hi everyone.

Designing a show in a small blackbox. Stage is roughly 20 x 12 ft, with a grid height of 9 ft. I need to hang a mic in the grid that will pick up actors wherever they are on stage, for the purpose of doing effects processing on vocals for a few "special effect" moments. Otherwise there will be no reinforcement. What kind of mic do I want? Do I maybe want two of them?

Thanks in advance!

 

[FMEng]

There is no such mic that will work under those conditions. Use wireless mics on the actors that need special effects, or pre-record the special effects and play them back.

 

[Footer]

What kind of "special effects" are you looking for? How small is small? Even with body mics you still might not get what you want to achieve.

 

[Joshualangman]

See stage dimensions in first post. Theatre sits 50. I want to do some reverb on actors for a dream sequence. I'm open to using several mics around the space, maybe choir mic sort of things? But I don't know.

 

[CanYouHearMeNow]

You will quickly run into issues if you add more and more mics in a small area. What is the seating option? Is it like there is a stage area and a seating area? Or is the seating all around which will make it even more difficult to get the sound to work. The easier option would be, as @FMEng said, to mic the actors and be extremely close to the source.

Another option may be just to have a dream music sound effect in the background.

 

[FMEng]

Let me explain a bit more. A mic or mics need to be much closer to the actors. There is no mic that can has a magic amount of "reach" to pick up a distant voice. That only works in the movies. Here is a good explanation of why:
http://www.sweetwater.com/insync/inverse-square-law/

You can only make up for distances losses by increasing electronic gain so much before feedback ensues. An actor with a strong, projecting voice can be amplified to some degree with a mic around 3 feet away, but certainly not 9 feet away. It could work to hide some mics on the set and block the actors to be in front of them when the sound effect is needed.

Another factor is the number of open mics. More isn't necessarily better. For every doubling of the number of open mics, you lose 3 dB of gain before feedback. You can work around that by turning down or turning off mics that are not used at any given time. It's a balance between having enough mics on stage to reduce the distances to the actors, and not having too many open at one time.