If you breathe properly, you should be able to project, without vocal strain. It's a skill of stagecraft that drama students learn (or used to learn). I usually sing without amplification; soemtimes it's with fairly large choral groups, though I've had to give announcements for songs in very large halls (2000+ seats) without benefit of microphone--and it can be done, if you're careful and skillful.

Singing with other people, I prefer not to use amplification, nor to rely on monitors. Sometimes I've sung Balkan stuff, and when we hit the interval of a second in real life without amplication, it sounds like distortion--the difference tones beat against each other and set up vibrations that are amazing to hear. You can't get your cues for this sort of thing from a monitor--all it sounds like is distortion, and you can't tune to that. I also sing with other groups and when we're in truly tight harmonies, we produce overtones octaves above. In good acoustic situations, we've been know to play the building--finding out what tones resonate with the stonework and using the building's architecture to amplify the naturally occuring overtone series we're producing. I wouldn't want to have to rely on electronics to try to do that.

One more "sans microphone" story--at last June's Old Songs Festival, there was a thunderstorm during the Friday evening concert. Being Old Songs rather than a wimpy sort of festival, we the audience stayed seated in the pouring rain and continued to listen to the performers. (Kat 'n t Seil from the Frisian region of the Netherlands was performing.) They couldn't believe that we would continue to sit in the downpour to listen to them, but we did. Then the lightning started hitting fairly close, and the sound people cut the power to the amplification, for safety's sake. Still, the audience continued to sit and listen, and the stunned performers continued to sing, selecting from their repertoire some songs that could be sung loud without amplification. They picked a chorus song, and the sopping-wet audience joined in. They took pictures from the stage to show back home, because they figured that nobody in the Netherlands would believe them when they told what happened, but this story is absolutely true, and they have the pictures to prove it. So even a festival can be done without amplification. (By the way, during the daytime there are several indoor stages at Old Songs that operate without microphones.)

--Charlie Baum