Musician Gear & Tech Discussion

How many of you use a sub in your stage gear ?

I have been considering an active sub for our larger and outdoor sets.

Just not sure if it's really worth the effort / expense.

How many of you use a sub in your stage gear ?

I have been considering an active sub for our larger and outdoor sets.

Just not sure if it's really worth the effort / expense.

You really only need to use Sub-Woofers if the music calls for it... dance, heavy punch rock and roll. Most all sub's work from 180hz to around 36hz.

If you want to suck the air out of peoples lungs then you will need lots of really big powerful subs.

George are you talking sub for your guitar amp? I thought you guys were already using subs in your p.a.? I would NEVER use a sub for my guitar amp. however I would never mic a backline (drums, guitar Bass guitar thru direct box) and run all thru a mixer for front of house control and not use a subs.

George I wouldnt want a sub onstage if that is what you are talking about, we always use them in the mains or out front.

At times if you push things too hard you tend to get a bass hum onstage anyway, I dont think I would do anything to add to that.

We use Peavey 15in monitors on stage, 4 of them, push them with a 1400 watt amp. That seems to do it for use, we dont need anymore bass onstage, I just think if you get all those low frequencys going up there around your drum mics, its gonna get picked up and make managing your overall sound hard to do.

Ive never seen anyone in my area use subs on stage, now we played at this hard rock club last friday and they basically had a PA wall by the drums, but out front where the rest of us where it was just 15 inch monitors.

Dude your turning into a real gear head arent you?

Good Luck and if do go with the subs onstage let us know how it works out, thinking more on this I tend to lower the 20-80HZ range on our stage monitors most of the time.

I've considered the addition of subs to our mains.
I'm already running four fields of monitors front back right & left fill. ( hot Spots for the side fill )

The more I think about it it may not be needed as with the new system I have 1K watts running two Peavey 15" mains for the front ( center ) of house plus 1.5K watts two the two Carvin LS2153 dual 15" towers.
( these have built in crossovers that separate the mids lows & highs to their respective drivers. )


Being as our front man Ray resigned last night
... I have a lot more issues to deal with now, so any more changes to the gear will have to wait for me to get my gear head on straight again.

It will really add to the quality of your sound to use subs. It however complicates thing a little. By using subs (Carvin has some NICE package prices) basically by filtering out the low frequency's from your existing speakers it free's them to work more efficiantly. The subs take over that job. Now the complications come in as you have to use a crossover to filter low freq. out of the top cabs and highs-mids from subs. In my system I have a SLIGHT lap of freq. at the top of the low end and bottom end of top speakers. Also you would want to time align the speakers so that the SPL from both top and bottom speakers reache the audience sweet spot at the same time this makes your system WAYyy more punchy. It is best to consider 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, and free space settings I have discussed on this site in the past regarding low freq.

I hope this helps. I know it sounds complicated but once you get used to it you'll be glad you did. George if you go to my site here at bm and watch the video's shot with barry's camera not the first one that was an iphone you can hear how good subs sound. Those subs are concert quality but with those carvin 4" voice coils you could get close to the same thing.

George we use 1 1x18 Yam subs, and 1 2x15 Yam tops. Hell Haley help me I cant remember what you call that DBX thing I bought a few years ago to replace our crossover, but we use it and our sound is real clean live.

Im bridging a 1800 watt amp into 4 ohms which puts about 13-1400 watts into the subs, then we have this 2000 watt amp running the tops we run it at 8 ohms so its probably pulling around 1200 watts into the tops.

I have a QSC power amp running our monitors, I run a line out each side to one monitor then daisy chain it to another one, this runs it into 4 ohms, I fgure we are using about 1400 watts in the monitor system.

We have lots of extra headroom everywhere, I very rarely crank this system up, which is great because with the eq in the dbx unit on the mains, our singer can wave his mic in front of the mains without any feedback, and then we also have a lot of headroom on the monitors.

I think having more amp than you need and then pulling it back some is the way to go, years ago when I pushed all my amps to the limit all the time we would blow amps right and left, but over the past 4 years, weve had no power amp issues.

The only thing I can remember that has happened is one night, one of the other guys hooked the monitors up out of phase, it would cancel its self, took me a few minutes to figure that one out, I thought an amp side was going or we had a bad cord, but it was just plugged in wrong.

Great input ... thank you!

I've been looking at and reading the manual on the XD360

http://www.carvinguitars.com/products/XD360


I,m embarrassed to say it just looks to damn complicated to me.

John, Its called a Driverack P.A. (DBX) I have that in my rack. It is a computer that does everything you need for processing of the front of house mains, 32 band eq parametric imput and graphic output, any configuration of crossover you can imagine, limiter, compression for the mains, feedback suppression that identify's the offending freq. and cuts it back automatically, pink noise generation and auto e.q. time alignment of drivers. this is simply the best piece of gear in my rack and would cost THOUSANDS to purchase MANY independent pieces of gear. It does all of this while only taking up 1 rack space!

I've considered the addition of subs to our mains.
I'm already running four fields of monitors front back right & left fill. ( hot Spots for the side fill )

The more I think about it it may not be needed as with the new system I have 1K watts running two Peavey 15" mains for the front ( center ) of house plus 1.5K watts two the two Carvin LS2153 dual 15" towers.
( these have built in crossovers that separate the mids lows & highs to their respective drivers. )


Being as our front man Ray resigned last night
... I have a lot more issues to deal with now, so any more changes to the gear will have to wait for me to get my gear head on straight again.

George before you buy this I would HIGHLY advise looking into the
driverack! It is the same price and has a lot more features. I just read up on this XD 360 and it just DOES NOT compare to the driverack! You know I love Carvin but not in this case.

Thanks for the heads up Jeff.

I will check it out.

I have a few spaces left in my new rolling rack I set up this week.

Carrying around 5 & 6 space cases sucks compared to having it all in one rolling case.

Live and learn.

Hey Sans,
If you want massive punch from your kick drums and floor toms, or you have a Hammond B3 with a lot of bass pedal, subs are the only way to go. You don't really need subs for anything else cause a bass amp usually covers the bottom just fine and voice and guitar simply don't go that low. We only use them for large crowds or outdoor shows and only with a sound crew to set em up and dial them in.

The driverack is a nice piece of kit but it is quite complex and honestly a lot of bands out here get it wrong and their sound suffers. If you have a serious tech guy who really understands how to use it you can get great results. For the rest of us mortals, a simple active sub crossover is a sure thing that is hard to screw up. A JBL MPRO 418P is a sweet powered sub we have used many times. It has a built in active crossover network and Crown amp so setup is a breeze and it will move furniture.

Hey Sans,
If you want massive punch from your kick drums and floor toms, or you have a Hammond B3 with a lot of bass pedal, subs are the only way to go. You don't really need subs for anything else cause a bass amp usually covers the bottom just fine and voice and guitar simply don't go that low. We only use them for large crowds or outdoor shows and only with a sound crew to set em up and dial them in.

The driverack is a nice piece of kit but it is quite complex and honestly a lot of bands out here get it wrong and their sound suffers. If you have a serious tech guy who really understands how to use it you can get great results. For the rest of us mortals, a simple active sub crossover is a sure thing that is hard to screw up. A JBL MPRO 418P is a sweet powered sub we have used many times. It has a built in active crossover network and Crown amp so setup is a breeze and it will move furniture.

I am the "sound guy".

That should clear it up some EH .

Thanks for your input.
Much to consider.

The whole kit and kabutal may be moving into a building downtown.
If so ... we will be doing "semi-public" rehearsals as a draw for the band as well as advertisement for my wife's business.

Hey Sans,
If you want massive punch from your kick drums and floor toms, or you have a Hammond B3 with a lot of bass pedal, subs are the only way to go. You don't really need subs for anything else cause a bass amp usually covers the bottom just fine and voice and guitar simply don't go that low. We only use them for large crowds or outdoor shows and only with a sound crew to set em up and dial them in.

The driverack is a nice piece of kit but it is quite complex and honestly a lot of bands out here get it wrong and their sound suffers. If you have a serious tech guy who really understands how to use it you can get great results. For the rest of us mortals, a simple active sub crossover is a sure thing that is hard to screw up. A JBL MPRO 418P is a sweet powered sub we have used many times. It has a built in active crossover network and Crown amp so setup is a breeze and it will move furniture.

IMO some of this is good advise. The only thing I disagree with is if you are wanting the BEST quality sound you can get why would you not want to learn how to get it? The driverack is really not that complicated especially if you are a computer person. If my dumb@ss can learn it anyone can. It amazes me because I have advised friends in other bands to get one and they never spend the ONE day to learn how to optimize using it! They turn right around and sell it because its too much trouble to learn? I spent ONE day setting it up all you have to do is follow the instructions after that its a NO BRAINER you turn your system on set your reference mic where you want the sweet spot in the room to be and hit auto eq. after you shoot about 6 or 7 rooms you don't really have to do it again. You just pick from the rooms you have already spectrum analyzed in the past that you have stored and named then load them and you have a PUNCHY FULL RANGE SOUND that is better than 99% of the other local bands you are competing with It's a NO BRAINER!

Just sayin?

You got me Jeff. I am strictly old school and essentially a computer dufus. I break out in a rash when trying to figure out some of these new digital signal processors. A 15yr old gamer could probably set up a driverack properly in no time.