General Music Chat

Who runs your sound? Does your band do it themselves or do you hire someone to do it? If a P.A. is provided do you have someone you know do it or are you at the mercy of the house guy? I have ran the sound for all the projects i have done solo or with a band. If something sounds off i fix it between songs unless it's bad! What do you guy do? Thanks Shawn

I do my own sound. I use a Peavey powered mixer XR684 and Peavey Black Widow mains. Never had a problem with it all these years. We're not a really complicated band, just straightforward blues, not a whole lot of different frequencies and high volumes to contend with. I think the simpler the better. I've seen a lot of bands have all kindes of PA problems, mainly due to not knowing what they're doing and trying to be too complicated with their various tunes.

We had a sound guy who ran the lights too. He actually built the PA amplifier (wound the transformer himself) and designed the light-show. I did the pyro-technics tho..

Pyro-technics? Light show? I'm happy to play with a 60 watt light bulb, compact fluorescent to reduce my carbon footprint!

Concussion powder. 1979. 2-part mix. Very dangerous and fun. Large carbon footprint (but in the 70's .. wtf) Entertaining and surprising for our audience.

Aint Yo Mama has a dedicated sound/light man. Hes pretty much a 5th member of the band.

Weve got around 10,000 watts total pa power. 18 in subs, 2x15 tops, we have 4 1x15 monitors. The whole shebang is awesome.

One of the best things we did was add a DBX Rack Pack. The crossover we had started giving us a lot of problems. In the search for a crossover i got introduced to the Rack Pack. If anyon on here is setting up a new pa system with seperate amps and mixer, I would recomend this unit in a heartbeat. It replaces the crossover and eq we had in the past. You hook your mixer into it and then you go straight to your power amps. So it takes the place of 2 units, eliminating extra wires.

What is a rack pack, first its an eq system. You have to have an RTA mic with the unit, but once everything is hooked up you turn pink noise up in the unit to scope your room. The unit has a few different room curves from flat to smiley faced. The guy that sold it to me suggested setting it flat. We did this a few gigs but it was too crisp, we wound up manually turning up the sub section and the sound was too harsh for our taste. We wound up using one of the happy face curves and its great. I can shoot the room with pink noise for about 45 seconds and it sets the eq. Its a great unit that also has compression delay in it. One other thing it has that I havent used yet is Feedback Elimination. It will automatically cut feedback frequencys. It sounds neat but since we got a handle on how to use this thing we arent gettting any feedback anyway.

So I would recomend one of these units to soundmen or do it yourself bands. If you are a band running sound yourself the feedback eliminator part of this unit might be a great thing to run when you dont have anyone out dront to reference your sound.

Gee, JW, that thing sounds great. I'll hafta look it up. Dddonnie usually sets up the PA for us, & then I tweak it. I know little about the stuff, but I can get pretty good sounds out of it & I don't know why -

Our drummer sets up the studio, & he gets better every time we get together.

I always set my own up as a solo, of course. I notice when other ppl set me up, my acoustic tends to sound real twangy & high with way too many mids.

We have a powerful p. a. 12 channel yamaha mixer, that I plan to upgrade to an Allen and Heath Mix Wizard as soon as I can find the right deal. The other gear we have are; power distribution, power conditioners, sonic maximizer, DBX driverack, 1 plx 3602 poweramp for the tops- 4 Jbl MRX single 15 with horn very light, 2 QSC 1602 poweramps for 2 JBL Mpro single 18s, 2 Yamaha 1500 poweramps for 2 Yorkville single 18,s. We play a lot of outside festival type settings where we need the power, but when we play small clubs we just use 1 top per side and 1 sub per side. I set the p. a. up and soundcheck everything I have already spectrum anylized (pink noised) all the venues we play and my wife comes in and mixes us while we play. The great thing about these DBX driveracks is after you shoot the room with the RTA mike you can save that setting (you just name the room) and your p.a. is now tuned to that room the next time you play there you just turn the Driverack on and scroll thru the names untill you recall that room and Bamm, I can't say enough good things about this peice of gear and how helpful it is except to say they are $499.00 & the RTA mike is $99.00 so for $600.00 you have a 1 space peice of gear you would have to spend thousands of dollars and take up a lot of space in your amp rack to get the same results. We use Shure and Carvin in ear wireless monitors these things are great but they take some getting use to, first of all they are rack mount units (single space) so they don't take up the space in your trailer, less to haul in and out of the venues you play, they are not prone to the feedback you can get in your monitor system, and they significantly reduce vocal strain, when you are in a 3 or 4 part vocal harmony and you step up to the mike their is no confusion as to which voice you are because they pick up every nuance of your voice. I have a sonic maximer that I run with the in ear monitors and I just love the way they perform together. I also have a sonic maximizer ran with the front of house mains.
I agree 150% with jw123 about the DBX sound processors, they make several different versions for different applications. True sound pros don't like them in a concert setting because the feedback supression tends to negate the things they do, if you find that happening in your usage of this peice of equipment you always have the option of just turning that function off. You just can't beat them for small clubs.

Well our deal was our old crossover was going on the blink. A decent Rane Crossover is areoun 300 bucks, and our main eq was close to 20 yrs old and was adding some noise. A good 31 band eq will cost 100-200 so we were looking at $500 dollars or more to fixe the problem for $100 more we got the Rack Pack.

Its a lot of money up front but in the end it eliminates a bunch of headaches.

I dont store the rooms we play in, I like to reshoot the room when you come back to it. We played this one place twice and I guess we didnt set the speakers in the same place as the first time and we got this weird hum. So we reshot the room and there was definite hump in the low area, that after I reshot the room was gone. Since it only takes a minute or so Ive decided to just reshoot any room we go to.

Actually the big pa system do use units like this to set up big shows, in the past things like this cost $1000 of dollars. I used to have a pink noise generator and a little box that would give me the eq curve it always took me 10-15 minutes to get a handle on the sound. If you set this unit to low resolution it will shoot the room in 20-30 seconds. I just love it.

Our soundguy sometimes has weird ideas about equing and likes to notch out huge slabs of frequencys, with this unit is kind of eliminates all that.

...and there was definite hump in the low area

Oh really?

A trick a friend that is a way better sound man than I am showed me, with these sound processors is when you spectrum anylize a room the computer (thats basically what they are) will in a lot of cases add some really steep boosts in some of the higher frequency's and some really steep cuts in the lower ones after I shoot a room I will go back into the e.q. section and check for these they are really hard on your drivers and for the most part are inaudible so not necessary. I will reduce any boosts over 4 to 5 db in the higher registers and 6 to 8 db in the lower registers if you try this it will for the most part eliminate those problems, I find that a d weighted curve in the e.q. section works better.

Oh and I forgot to say that you have to place your speakers in the same spot that you originally shot the room from because there is a difference in things such as free space when you fly your subs the worse possible scenario, 1/8 space when you place your subs in a corner 2 walls and a floor, 1/4 space when you place your subs where there is 1 wall and floor, 1/2 space just a floor as in an outside venue all of these things effect the amount of base or bottom end to your sound and this effects your overall e.q. another trick I use is I always set up a c.d. player thru the p.a. with a c.d. I trust has a good full sound and as it is playing I go up to the driverack and get into the crossover setting and either turn up the low end or turn it down whatever is necessary this is like a volumn control for your bottom end and that also helps with that low end hum and your overall e.q.

I do my own sound. I use a Peavey powered mixer XR684 and Peavey Black Widow mains. Never had a problem with it all these years. We're not a really complicated band, just straightforward blues, not a whole lot of different frequencies and high volumes to contend with. I think the simpler the better. I've seen a lot of bands have all kindes of PA problems, mainly due to not knowing what they're doing and trying to be too complicated with their various tunes.

I do it a lot like Bob.
Set up
plug in
play 1st song
tweak if necessary
rock out the rest of the gig.
Been doin' it this way since the 60's for the average gig.

For big venues, sound is usually provided,
otherwise, never had much use for a knob twister takin' up valuable space , drinkin' for free, and expectin' a cut of the bread.

I usually only mike the kick drum, so it's an easy and self manageable set up.

keep it as simple as you can,
HJ

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

Holy crap batman!
This all sounds too deep for such a shallow guy like me.
Plug in, turn on, quick sound check from center mass. Let er rip!

I have been studying up though. When I die I am going to use the insurance money to upgrade my system.