hey all does anybody want to venture a strategy to help me capture:

a female vocalist with HUGE dynamic range,

as well as her simultaneous hand claps

I'm thinking...what am I thinking?

treat as one instrument and use a LDC with compression to tame it
or perhaps use an LDC and a focused mic for the hand claps...

she will be performing in the room with a cajon and flamenco guitar player, and possibly two other clappers.

Figure I'll capture the whole room and I'm not worried about the other sounds.

Just wonder about the leader.

Maybe use dynamic mics more like a live show?

hmmm....what say you?

I've just completed a similar live recording, we had two singers / clappers, 2 clappers, a guitarist , a percussionist and several dancers in many combinations. We set the singers up with condensers mic that would also work for FOH & Monitor positions (Atm 4055). We also added clap mics on the vocal positions, about 12" from their hands, frankly the they were still too close for a natural sounding pick-up, the clapping picked up on the vocal mics sounded fine, especially mixed with the other clappers. One of the singers has the dynamic range of "King Kong" and he used his full range, so we split off his vocal mic and recorded the second input 15 db lower, rather than risking over compressing at the record stage.
For the dancers we created an arc from stage left to right using 6 B&K 4011 , we bought some of those pipe insulators (as shock absorbers), cut them to size , slid the 4011 in and place them on the deck, they worked beautifully.

FANTASTIC!

thank you CeeBee