I was doing sound for my church last Christmas. We’re a small church (about 280 people), but we have some incredibly talented musicians.

For this service we had a baby grand piano, keys, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and a small chorus of church members who don’t necessarily have a lot of experience on stage, but wanted to sing on Christmas.

I don’t know if you’ve ever mic’d up a harp for someone who is switching between instruments and coming on and off stage, but it’s… challenging. The best way to mic it is to put a condenser on the top of the sound board. The problem is that the player has to move and reposition the microphone. More importantly, they have to remember to move it or they’ll either bump it and send shockwaves through the congregation, or they’ll forget to put it back after they sit down and you won’t really hear them. The alternate method is to crawl under the harpist’s seat and put a mic between their legs, pointing into the back of the harp. Also harps are so quiet that they need a lot of gain, which invites feedback.

Another challenge was the chorus. I put three condenser mics on the chorus, which was directly behind the piano. I worked to get the chorus as far away from the piano as I could to avoid bleed into the chorus mics. Also, the chorus were not experienced performers, so they were very quiet, which meant I had to turn up the gain on their microphones quite a bit.

The baby grand piano had a mic, but the player plays plenty loud so it wasn’t an issue. The acoustic guitar and electric guitar were plugged in, so they weren’t a problem, but there were four or five vocal mics for individual singers.

If you’ve ever done live sound before, you might know where this is headed next… FEEDBACK! Managing the levels to avoid feedback in a situation like this is a nightmare. It’s my least favorite thing. The best thing to do in my opinion is to eliminate as many microphones on the stage as possible, for instance, if the acoustic guitar were mic’d, which would have sounded nicer, I would plug it in directly and eliminate that microphone.

The other issue is more of a mixing issue. The piano, acoustic guitar, and harp all sit in the same frequency range. This is an issue because of a phenomenon called masking, where you can’t really hear anything because the piano is mudding up the guitar, harp is mudding up the piano, etc. The way to overcome that and make it to wear you can hear everything is to do some strategic EQ moves and clear everything up.

Then it happened. We were in between some testing and making adjustments, and Carl the harp play was tuning his harp. I noticed that he had a cable hanging out of the harp and plugged into the tuner, which meant that cable was carrying signal to the tuner so he could tune the instrument. I asked him what he was using to tune the harp, and he told me he had a little piezo pickup that he dropped in the harp just for tuning purposes.

I thought about it for a second, then told him we were going to plug the piezo into a DI box, eliminate the microphone, and see how it sounds.

After about five minutes of work, we ended up with a setup where we didn’t need to worry about feedback (from that microphone), we didn’t have to worry about repositioning microphones every time he got up, and much to my surprised delight, the sound of the piezo (piezo pickups tend to sound very thin and “tinny,” just listen to an electric/acoustic guitar that’s plugged in instead of mic’d) sounded incredible in the mix. The tinny sound of the piezo pickup eliminated the masking issues between the piano and guitar and let the harp cut through the mix without much intervention by me, the sound guy.

All of this is to say that when you’re in a live sound situation or in a recording studio, there are “traditional” ways of doing things, and there are some best practices to keep in mind when recording stuff, but there is no single way to record a source. You can be creative with how you approach the process. Experiment, and figure out unique solutions to your unique problems.