Mic techniques
One thing you learn how to do singing in a rock band is how to eat the mic. You need to be right on top of it, lips brushing against the grill, and not afraid of it. The position of the mic ball relative to your mouth and nose will give you tons of total variation. In a classroom, if I needed to sing full voice, I simply pushed the mic away a few inches. But normally I ate the mic at all times. It also gives your voice much more gravitas and authority.
After my 600-student school, I took a position teaching general music and chorus in a school with 2,500+ students. The music room was huge with great acoustics, a rugged floor, and cathedral ceilings. The school had a cheap 100w 4-channel powered mixer with two 12” passive speakers – but it was perfect. I used that PA every day, every class - as well as for all my chorus rehearsals. I used my own SM58s.
What Exactly Do You Need?
If you are in a traditional elementary school, you probably have some form of a performing area on a multi-purpose room stage or a cafeteria stage. Many times those rooms have PAs built into them. The problem with these systems though is that sound reinforcement is aimed at the audience and not at the people on stage – so they don’t help kids a lot in a chorus rehearsal situation.
Solution: go to Musician's Friend or Sweetwater and pick up some kind of four-channel powered mixer speaker package. It will be the best several hundred dollars you spend and your voice will thank you. You'll be able to use it in your classroom, too. With that one small PA system, you'll be able to cover all your general music classes as well as your chorus rehearsals.
Make sure the powered mixer is Bluetooth-ready. If you have an old amp, Bluetooth receivers are fairly cheap and east to retro-fit to your needs.
The crucial thing is to have the speakers at least three feet off the ground. Tabletops or Ultimate Support stands are fine.
If you're working in a school that has no PA system in its auditorium or performance stage area, you need to find something fast. Lots of principals don't think PA systems are that important. How many times have you heard the principal bellow “I don't need a microphone, my voice is loud” and then within 90 seconds they've gone back to typical room conversation levels. If you need a PA for a large performance space, get some advice. The best person I could recommend is the soundman and drummer in our band, Bob Brown. He's kept up with technology and would be able to put together an affordable bid list for your school to pursue. Let me know if you want to consult with him.
Don’t share your mic.
Every music teacher needs to have a personal microphone. You need a cardioid dynamic microphone. Get one without a cord – buy that separately. It will require an XLR mic cord to plug into a professional mixer or amplifier. If you plan to plug it into a line mixer, you’ll need an adaptor - female XLR to female ¼ inch.
As far as which mic you should buy, go with the industry standard and get a Shure SM58. Purchase one without an “on-off” switch. If you really want the ability to turn it off and on, buy an XLR cable that has an “on-off” switch. Pick up a replacement screen, too. You can clean the original with an alcohol-soaked cloth but they eventually get to the point of no return. The best part of this: SM58s aren’t that expensive and last for a long time if you don’t abuse them that much.
One thing you learn how to do singing in a rock band is how to eat the mic. You need to be right on top of it, lips brushing against the grill, and not afraid of it. The position of the mic ball relative to your mouth and nose will give you tons of total variation. In a classroom, if I needed to sing full voice, I simply pushed the mic away a few inches. But normally I ate the mic at all times. It also gives your voice much more gravitas and authority.
After my 600-student school, I took a position teaching general music and chorus in a school with 2,500+ students. The music room was huge with great acoustics, a rugged floor, and cathedral ceilings. The school had a cheap 100w 4-channel powered mixer with two 12” passive speakers – but it was perfect. I used that PA every day, every class - as well as for all my chorus rehearsals. I used my own SM58s.
What Exactly Do You Need?
If you are in a traditional elementary school, you probably have some form of a performing area on a multi-purpose room stage or a cafeteria stage. Many times those rooms have PAs built into them. The problem with these systems though is that sound reinforcement is aimed at the audience and not at the people on stage – so they don’t help kids a lot in a chorus rehearsal situation.
Solution: go to Musician's Friend or Sweetwater and pick up some kind of four-channel powered mixer speaker package. It will be the best several hundred dollars you spend and your voice will thank you. You'll be able to use it in your classroom, too. With that one small PA system, you'll be able to cover all your general music classes as well as your chorus rehearsals.
Make sure the powered mixer is Bluetooth-ready. If you have an old amp, Bluetooth receivers are fairly cheap and east to retro-fit to your needs.
The crucial thing is to have the speakers at least three feet off the ground. Tabletops or Ultimate Support stands are fine.
If you're working in a school that has no PA system in its auditorium or performance stage area, you need to find something fast. Lots of principals don't think PA systems are that important. How many times have you heard the principal bellow “I don't need a microphone, my voice is loud” and then within 90 seconds they've gone back to typical room conversation levels. If you need a PA for a large performance space, get some advice. The best person I could recommend is the soundman and drummer in our band, Bob Brown. He's kept up with technology and would be able to put together an affordable bid list for your school to pursue. Let me know if you want to consult with him.
Don’t share your mic.
Every music teacher needs to have a personal microphone. You need a cardioid dynamic microphone. Get one without a cord – buy that separately. It will require an XLR mic cord to plug into a professional mixer or amplifier. If you plan to plug it into a line mixer, you’ll need an adaptor - female XLR to female ¼ inch.
As far as which mic you should buy, go with the industry standard and get a Shure SM58. Purchase one without an “on-off” switch. If you really want the ability to turn it off and on, buy an XLR cable that has an “on-off” switch. Pick up a replacement screen, too. You can clean the original with an alcohol-soaked cloth but they eventually get to the point of no return. The best part of this: SM58s aren’t that expensive and last for a long time if you don’t abuse them that much.
If the budget has room for them, buy two extra SM58s – one for solos and one for announcers.
Wireless mics are an option but I wouldn’t strongly recommend them for class or chorus use. I used two high-end rack-mount Audio-Technica units – one headset and one transmitter for my guitar and bass- on gigs. While they sounded great and took a beating, I rarely used them in school. They can be finicky and are delicate compared to the tank-like SM58.
While you can get a SM58 for close to $100.00, a decent wireless will cost about four times that much. Their batteries drain very quickly, especially if the transmitter is far away from the receiver. When batteries go on wireless, it sounds like a static storm. If you are in a school and inherit a wireless system, go for it. You might like it. Before you spend any money on a wireless system, see if can borrow one and try it out.
Get To Know Your Voice
If you were an instrumental major in college, you probably got up close and personal with your instrument. You knew all its idiosyncrasies, which notes were intrinsically flat, sharp, or spot-on. You knew the effects of heat and cold on your instrument and took all the adequate precautions and performed all required maintenance. If you’re teaching elementary general music, not only do you need to master piano and guitar: you have to get your vocal instrument up and running.
Universities skimp on vocal pedagogy with instrumental education majors and they typically teach nothing about using amplification and proper mic technique. The most vocal instructions I had in college was one semester of class voice with the incomparable Marvin Keenze. What I learned about my voice, singing, public speaking, and mic techniques came from on-the-job experience in the classroom or on gigs.
The best paying you can do when learning about your vocal instrument is paying attention. That’s what I had to do once I started singing back-up in a rock band and eventually became the lead vocalist fronting our band.
Singing in a rock band can be a lot of fun but there are many pitfalls. First, you are typically singing rangy music that are probably covers that your audience is familiar with. No pressure there, right?
Next, if you are being drowned out by drums, guitar amps, or poorly placed main speakers, you can't hear yourself on stage and you push your voice to the point of hurting it. It’s easy to sing out of tune if you can't hear yourself or the reference pitches. Early on, you figure out the value of monitors. If you’re singing in a band, use Hot Spot monitors for vocal reference. Stay away from floor wedges if you can. Get the mix right.
Let the mic and amp do the work. Focus on your tone at first, not power. Attitude and aggressiveness can be achieved through big singing technique.
Any PA that I set up in my classroom or on a stage for a chorus rehearsal had two speakers slightly behind me and pointed away from my mic to avoid feedback or unwanted resonant frequencies. They were primarily functioning as mains for the children singing but also provide some monitor sound for me.
Learn Your Voice Like You Learned Your Instrument.
Which are your best vocal notes? What is your actual range? What happens when you move from your chest voice to your head voice and vice versa when you sing? Who do people tell you sound like?” Is your sound coming through from your throat or from your chest? What songs do you perform best? Do you know the best ranges for the elementary voice and can you sing in those ranges?
How open are your sinuses? They act as resonator cavities in your head. If they're clogged, your sound production will be diminished probably in the area of 75%.
Keep your sinuses clear! More on sinuses in another post – it is a critical issue.
People will tell you that if you sing you shouldn't consume any dairy products, or you shouldn't smoke, you shouldn't drink alcohol before hand. That depends.
First off, a non-negotiable: stay away from tobacco and drugs when singing. As somebody who played years in smoky clubs, ate whatever was put in front of me on a 10-minute break, and took all the free drinks from customers I was offered, I never found those rules to be non-negotiables for me. They might be for you, but they weren't for me.
I always had water, a diet tonic water, or diet coke handy on gigs or in the classroom. Coffee will dry out your system so it will work against keeping your cords lubricated. When I was doing 4, 5, or 6 hours singing gigs, I also used sugar-free cough drops.
A word of warning against cough drops: I always was mindful that I could choke on a cough drop but I never did. I'm not recommending cough drops in your mouth while you’re singing. But they did help my voice and kept it well-lubricated.
Take Away Point: You can always go out and buy a new guitar or piano, but you can't buy new voice. First things first. Put your money where your mouth is. Pay attention to how your voice works. When in doubt, use amplification. Spend some money on decent sound reinforcement equipment. Convince your school that they need to pay for it.
If your schools are as cheap as some of mine were, find a way to finance it with money from your 16.5 hour business and look for ways to turn that expenditure into a new renewable asset.
Let the mic and amp do the work.
DO NOT push your voice if you get laryngitis, a bad cold, or post nasal drip. Take a sick day and sleep. If you have to go in, show movies. Have a listening day. Play the classical hits while kids either color, draw, or read quietly.
Singing or teaching with no voice can damage your voice – sometimes irreparably.
Once you get a handle on using a mic, buy some cheap mics and teach kids how to sing into them.
I’ll close with a cautionary tale.
There was a period of time where I was singing all day at work and singing about twelve hours over the weekend. Toward the end of one late night gig, I was singing a song and suddenly notes were not sounding. It just sounded like air. Not a Rasp. Not a cough. But air. My initial fear was that I had screwed myself by singing too much and developed vocal nodes – scars theat develop on your cords from singing too much or incorrectly. I checked in with my ETN specialist.
He had experience with professional opera singers and was knowledgeable about singing in relation to the vocal apparatus. The first thing he did was ask questions and listen. Then he asked me to sing a few songs a capella.
From there he examined my mouth and nose with a tapered flashlight and moved to an endoscope. It involved sending a tube with a camera at its end up each nostril to check out my throat, esophagus, vocal cords, and much of my sinuses. We could see what the camera saw in real time on a TV monitor as he focused on my cords and had me sing scales to see how my cords reacted to changes in frequencies.
Thankfully, there were no nodes. He said my vocal technique was excellent (whew!) but I was spending too many hours singing and not enogh hours resting. He described my dilemma this way:
“Think of the notes you sing as water in a pitcher. As you sing, you are pouring water out of the pitcher. Resting refills the pitcher.
Eventually as the water get lower in the pitcher and you don’t refill it to the top, you will start to lose notes. Once the pitcher is empty, you cannot sing. You can make sounds but they will only hurt your vocal cords and prolong the recovery. Stop singing and talking. Rest.”
Good advice!
This covers the basics - more in-depth info will follow.
If you have any questions, send them my way at [email protected] .
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