By George Petersen

SOMETIMES THE SIMPLE TECHNIQUE WORKS BEST. Our senior editor Blair Jackson came to me with an age-old problem. One of his kids was doing a play in a high school gymnasium and the audio was terrible. Some well-intentioned person had evidently hung some dynamic mics over the stage, which helped, but added no intelligibility and when cranked up to provide more gain, created an awful feedback problem. Fortunately, in this case, they DIDN’T have the budget for wireless mics. For some reason, every amateur theater group thinks it’s some kind of panacea, even though wireless (especially cheap wireless) often creates more problems than it solves, unless your sound engineer is extremely astute.

To make matters worse, the entire sound system had floor-mount XLR mic jacks, which were hard wired to a PA head (of unknown brand/origin) that was located in a locked closet that now one seemed to have access to. The way the PA operated was simply to plug a mic(s) into a floor jack and it was live. Blair asked what I would recommend. I loaned him a couple of Rode NTG-2 shotgun mics (the ones that can be phantom powered or run from a single AA battery) and pre-set them in the bass rolloff position.


I figured this was probably the safest choice, and with the non-access to the mixer/PA head/whatever, would safely skirt any “but there’s no phantom power” issues. I suggested placing them on boom stands located just in front of the stage, and raised a couple feet above the floor level–to avoid emphasizing foot noise.

After the gig, I asked him how everything went, and he replied “it was fantastic” and mentioned that several people sitting in the back said it was the first time they could ever make out the dialog from the cheap seats. Anyway, it just goes to prove that sometimes a simple approach is best.


When not working on MIX stuff, George Peterse n records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Click here www.jenpet.com/ariel.html and check ‘em out.
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