I have never recorded anything with a lapel mic, so I cant share any experiences.
But it seems obvious that it depends heavily on the quality and placement of the mics as well as what they are connected to.
A high end USB mic, placed on a stand in a proper position, in a room with not too horrid acoustics, seems to come closer to the condenser mic setups usually recommended for home studios than any lapel mic.
But a cheapo USB mic placed a bit too far away, on a table top that reflects bad room acoustics onto the mic, might not sound better than a good lapel mic.
Edit:
My thought is, if you go for a lapel mic - it is because you prioritize not having to worry about mic stands. Then contemplating about the sound quality if you did have stuff that require a stand seems counter productive.
I have rigged my music stand for gigging with an adjustable gooseneck mic holder on it, so it needs no additional mic boom in the shot.
I agree mic placement has a huge affect. A pro tip for the little leaguers out there is, for vocals, make the "hang loose" hand gesture and put the thumb to your chin. Where the pinkie ends up is the best beginning mic distance to get good capture while avoiding plosives.
Know what type of mic pickup pattern your mic is: it is omni-directional, accepting sound equally from every direction, is it cardioid or heart-shaped pattern, like a valentine heart vee shape? That means your mouth has to stay within a 45-degree cone of acceptance from the front of the mic, or you fall off dramatically. Is the mic hypercardioid or highly directional, like a shotgun mic? That cone is even narrower and if you stray from it you fall out of the mix. For ukers, the considerations are: do you need the mic to pick up your vocals and the acoustic uke sound equally, or does the uke have a pickup and amplifier for itself? If the uke has no pickup, are you going to mic the uke separately, or try to get your uke and vocal off one mic? In that last case, you want an omni-directional pickup pattern or a regular cardioid pattern set a little further back, so mouth and uke sound hole are both in the 45-degree "cone of acceptance".
I've worked with broadcast quality Lav mics daily, along with "stick" mics of many types for over three decades, and It's for this reason that I say a good quality lavaliere mic in the right spot
can work for you in an acoustic uke recording situation. The "right spot" in this case would be just a little lower than your clavicle, pointing down towards your shoes, away from your mouth, towards the uke. You want to have it pinned properly to your clothing, (there is an art to this, I can give details if someone cares) and the cable hidden inside the clothing needs to be taped-down, so it can't move around and rustle. Because it's omni-directional, you will have to think about speaker placement and stage noise in a crowd, but at home these are not concerns.
Why point the lav mic downwards? This eliminates it "popping" from plosives like the
B or
P sound when you speak or sing, it also doesn't pick up your breathing that way. This is a technique long-practiced by the BBC, who are the masters of sound capture since the twenties. Good brands of lav mic include Tascam, Rode, Countryman, Shure, Sennheiser, AKG, Point Source Audio, and at home I use a little Audio-Technica that was less than thirty bucks, so you can get some decent quality for that price if you stick to well-known brands. Lavs come in hard-wired and wireless body pack styles. The wireless ones cost more but many of them now include an on-board recorder in the body pack so if the radio link gets disrupted, you still have a clean recording after the fact. That does cost extra of course. If you just wanted to experiment with one, I say try the hard-wired low-end Audio_Technica first. It will need to be plugged into either a camera or phone, or into a USB converter if you record to laptop.
