P.A. Equipment

Hi all, hope someone can help me with this question;
can you link 2 mixer desks together so as to give you more outputs for mics?
The reason i ask is that we are now thinking of micing all the band up now instead of just vocals and we have a spare mixer to use up if we can,instead of buying a larger one.

thanks for your help

Many ways this can be done.

On our present set up We use two powered mixers.

One is dedicated to the drum mic's ( except the condensers ) and the bass.

The MAIN Power output drives the bass and drum monitors ( 4 15" speakers @ 2 ohms )
The monitor line out feeds one input of the STAGE PA which handles all the other instrument inputs as well as the condensers from the drum kit & all three vocal mics.

Setting the stage sound environment can be a little tricky but once that is done it is easy enough to tweak the MAINS for the sound our audience will hear.

This is a temporary set up however until we can afford a board with the + /- 20 inputs we need.
The new board will be a non powered mixer so that I can run different amplifiers for each of the six monitors as well as mains.

Hi all, hope someone can help me with this question;
can you link 2 mixer desks together so as to give you more outputs for mics?
The reason i ask is that we are now thinking of micing all the band up now instead of just vocals and we have a spare mixer to use up if we can,instead of buying a larger one.

thanks for your help

A couple questions first:
Can your speaker system handle it? A lot of modern PA speakers are tuned to reproduce vocals well but don't handle much bass and kick drum. Running bass and kick through a vocal tuned PA often just muddies up the mix. Adding subs/crossovers/separate amps will clean it up and reproduce a full band well.

Do you have enough quality mics? Nothing sounds worse than a drum kit with lousy mics on it.

We have used separate mixers using one as a dedicated drum submix and the other main board for the rest of the band. You can run your submixer outs to the main inputs if your other board has them. You can also run the submixer outs to a spare input channel for a single fader submix control of the drums. It just depends on what you want to do.

After many years of playing live shows and with the full band miced we have recently gone the other way. We ditched our subs and just mic vocals for small shows. Medium sized shows we might put a little guitar and keys in the main mix and monitors so everyone can hear. Large shows like city concerts and street fairs we leave the sound, lights, and mic setup to the pro sound company. This really simplifies our setup and we get more consistent results with 1/2 the gear to drag around.