I performed at a venue in Graz where the sound system was, charitably, a relic. The PA speakers were mounted high on the walls, angled vaguely toward the audience. The mixing board looked like it had survived both the Cold War and several beer spills. And the only microphone available was a wired handheld that weighed about as much as a small weapon.
I was annoyed. I had specifically requested a lavalier mic — the small clip-on variety that attaches to your tie or lapel and frees both hands. For a performer who works with cards and mentalism props, having both hands free is not a preference. It feels like a necessity. The lavalier was my default. My comfort zone. My assumption about how a microphone should work.
But the venue did not have a lavalier. They had the handheld, and they had me, and the show started in twenty minutes.
So I used the handheld. And by the end of the evening, I had discovered something I did not expect: the handheld microphone gave me a level of vocal control that the lavalier never had.
The Lavalier Compromise
Let me start with the lavalier, because it is the microphone most performers gravitate toward, and for understandable reasons.
Dan Harlan, in his Tarbell Lesson 83 lecture on magic as theater, provides one of the most practical microphone guides I have encountered. He walks through the lavalier setup in detail: clip the mic to your tie just below your mouth, wrap the cord around the tie, run the cord between your shirt buttons and inside your shirt, route it to one side with the excess tucked away, and connect it to the belt-mounted transmitter pack. His final step is to stand as straight as possible, stretch the cord out, then relax — so you can open your jacket, take your jacket off, and access all your pockets without ever catching the cord.
This is smart advice, and it works. The lavalier is the choice of most professional speakers and many stage magicians because it solves the most obvious problem: it frees your hands.
But it creates another problem that most performers never think about, because it is a problem of absence rather than presence. The lavalier is fixed. Once you clip it on, it stays at a constant distance from your mouth. This means your vocal dynamic range — the distance between your softest and loudest sounds as captured by the microphone — is determined entirely by your voice. The mic does not move. Only your voice does.
For most speaking applications, this is fine. A keynote speaker delivering a forty-minute talk does not need extreme dynamic range. A steady, well-projected voice at a consistent volume works perfectly with a lavalier.
But for a magic or mentalism performance, where you might want to whisper one moment and project the next — where the emotional texture of the performance demands dramatic shifts in volume and intimacy — the fixed-position lavalier becomes a limitation. If you whisper, the lavalier may not pick it up clearly. If you shout, the lavalier may distort. The mic captures whatever it captures at its fixed distance, and you have no way to adjust that relationship on the fly.
The Handheld Advantage
The handheld microphone, by contrast, is a variable. You can move it.
This sounds so obvious that it barely seems worth stating. But the implications for performance are significant.
When you hold a microphone and bring it close to your mouth, it picks up everything. Your whisper becomes audible to the entire room. The soft, intimate quality of your voice — the breathiness, the texture, the warmth that disappears at a distance — is captured and amplified. The audience hears you the way someone standing three inches from your face would hear you.
When you hold the microphone at arm’s length, it picks up less. Your voice has to project more to be heard. The sound becomes more open, more public, more like a traditional stage voice. The intimacy disappears, replaced by projection and authority.
And everything in between — every gradation from close to far — is available to you in real time. You are not committed to a single dynamic relationship with the mic. You can adjust constantly, moment by moment, word by word, shifting the microphone’s distance to match the emotional demands of the performance.
That evening in Graz, standing on stage with a handheld mic I did not want, I discovered this by accident. During the quieter moments of my mentalism piece, I instinctively brought the mic closer to my mouth. During the higher-energy moments, I let it drift to a more natural distance. And the audience responded to those shifts in a way they had never responded when I used a lavalier.
The quiet moments felt quieter. The loud moments felt louder. Not because my voice was doing anything dramatically different, but because the microphone was amplifying the contrast. The tool was enhancing the range I already had.
The Trade-Off
Nothing is free, and the handheld microphone demands a significant payment: it occupies one of your hands.
For a close-up card magician, this is a serious problem. Card work requires two hands for almost everything. Shuffling, spreading, displaying, executing moves — the mechanics of close-up card magic assume two available hands. A handheld mic makes close-up card work somewhere between awkward and impossible.
For a stage performer or mentalist, the calculus is different. Much of what I do on stage does not require two hands simultaneously. I can hold props in one hand and the mic in the other. I can set the mic in a stand during the moments that require both hands and pick it up again afterward. I can design my routines to accommodate the one-hand limitation.
But it requires design. You cannot simply pick up a handheld mic and perform your existing material without adjustment. You need to map out, beat by beat, when you need the mic hand and when you need both hands. You need to think about where the mic stand goes. You need to practice transitioning between holding the mic and not holding it, because that transition — the moment of placing the mic in the stand or picking it back up — is a visible action that the audience will notice if it is clumsy.
I spent several practice sessions in my hotel room working through my material with a hairbrush as a stand-in microphone. Ridiculous, yes. But effective. I learned which routines worked with a handheld and which absolutely required a lavalier. I learned where the natural handoff points were — the moments where I could set the mic down without disrupting the flow. And I learned that some of my most effective moments could only exist with a handheld, because those moments depended on the dynamic range that only a handheld provides.
The Headset Option
There is a middle ground: the headset microphone, the flesh-toned boom mic that curves around your ear. The headset gives you hands-free operation with better sound quality than a lavalier because it is closer to your mouth and tracks your head movement. It does not rub against clothing. For most performers, it is probably the optimal all-around choice.
But it still does not give you variable distance. You cannot bring a headset closer for a whisper or push it away for a shout. The distance is fixed. You gain consistency but lose the ability to physically control your dynamic range.
For my keynote speaking, I use the headset. For my dedicated magic and mentalism performances, where emotional texture is the priority, I now prefer the handheld. The trade-off of one hand is worth the control I gain.
Practical Microphone Technique
A few things I have learned about using a handheld mic effectively, most of them through doing it wrong first.
Hold the mic at a consistent baseline distance. For me, this is about a fist’s width from my mouth — roughly four to five inches. This is where my normal speaking voice sounds clear and natural through the PA. It is my home position. The mic returns here between adjustments.
When you want to go intimate, bring the mic to about two inches from your mouth. Do not touch your lips — that creates handling noise and plosives. But two inches captures the whispered, breathy quality that creates intimacy.
When you want to project, let the mic drift to eight or ten inches. Your voice needs to be stronger at this distance, which naturally creates a more authoritative sound. But do not go too far — the PA will start picking up room noise instead of yours.
Always hold the mic below your chin, angled upward. Never hold it in front of your face — it blocks the audience’s view of your expressions.
And always do a proper sound check. Harlan is emphatic about this. Sound on stage does not equal sound in the audience. If possible, have someone stand on stage while you sit in the audience and listen. What the audience hears is the only thing that matters.
Feedback and Awareness
One practical note: feedback — the howling loop that happens when the mic picks up its own output from the speakers — is the constant enemy. The prevention is spatial awareness. Know where the speakers are. Never point the mic toward a speaker. Never cup the mic head with your hand, which changes the pickup pattern. Harlan notes that modern wireless mics handle this better than older systems, but venue-provided equipment varies wildly. The ballroom mic at a hotel in Vienna and the house mic at a conference center in a smaller town are not the same instrument. If you perform regularly, owning your own system gives you consistency.
The Microphone as Expressive Tool
Here is what I want to leave you with, because this is the insight that changed my relationship with the microphone entirely.
The microphone is not a utility. It is not just the thing that makes you louder. It is an expressive instrument, as much a part of your performance toolkit as your voice, your gestures, your props, and your stage movement.
When you think of the mic as a utility, you clip it on or pick it up and forget about it. When you think of it as an instrument, you use it. You play it. You adjust it moment by moment to shape the audience’s experience. You bring it close for the secret. You let it drift for the announcement. You use its proximity to create intimacy and its distance to create authority.
The singers who are masters of the handheld microphone — and there are great performers who treat the mic as a dance partner, pulling it close and pushing it away as the song demands — they understand this intuitively. The microphone is not separate from the performance. It is part of the performance.
For magicians and mentalists, the microphone is perhaps the most underutilized tool in the arsenal. We obsess over props. We spend hours on sleight of hand. We study misdirection and audience psychology and scripting. But we rarely think about the microphone as a creative instrument.
I did not think about it until a venue in Graz forced me to use a handheld I did not want. And what I discovered was that the microphone, wielded deliberately, gives me something no other tool provides: physical control over how my voice reaches the audience. Not just what I say, or how I say it, but how it sounds when it arrives in their ears.
That is a kind of control worth having. Even if it costs you a hand.