| T.R | Title | User | Personal
Name | Date | Lines |
|---|
| 2603.1 | An experience | ELESYS::JASNIEWSKI | Why not ask why? | Tue Oct 06 1992 10:32 | 40 |
|
I set up and mixed for Lourdes one time, at the Blacksmith house
in Harvard sq. It was a friend of a friend deal; some equipment
was mine, some belonged to another band, some was my friends.
The first thing I noticed was that the bass drivers werent working
in the peavey sp-3 that were just carried in - I wondered what was
banging around on the insides of the cabs. So, I opened one up,
reached in and pulled out this transformer like thing - it was the
crossover inductor! Ripped clean off its rivited mounting; I guess
travel can be really hard on a speaker. Just happened to have my
trusty soldering iron and solder on me, so, I managed to paste
everything back together to have a working PA system.
I had one person's SPX-90 providing the reverb, my DBX-119 for
compression, a soundcraftsman eq; these things wired up using adapters,
as some were home hifi components. The system, along with my trusty
Phase Linear 400 and my Peavey 12 channel mixer, proved reliable.
The guy who opened up was pretty difficult to mix. He was blowin
a harp, singing and playing an acoustic guitar, so I was riding
two levels constantly depending on how close his guitar was to that
mic, and whether he was singing or blowing harp. One time, I thought
he was going the blow the harp right on through the speakers, but
the DBX-119 was quicker than I was and saved things.
I did pretty well with Lourdes and her band. Probably could
have mixed the bassist's vocals a little stronger, but I was a bit
apprehensive actually, as I didnt want things to "run away" on me.
As it was, I only let one feedback squeel get past me (it's like
being a goalie) during the performance, which I'm real proud of.
The sound production was very nice and inoffensively listenable,
due to my judicious use of compression and eq, as I recall. Oh,
I also ran a mono tape recording of the show.
Later I was rewarded with a spot of cash, which I accepted (the
job was originally on a friends helping friends basis) and it was
commented on how I "saved the gig" with the speaker repair.
Joe
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| 2603.2 | there's no substitute for experience.... | NAVY5::SDANDREA | Toy Syndrome Addict | Tue Oct 06 1992 10:38 | 5 |
| RE: joe jas -1
good job joe! you were a hero!
|
| 2603.3 | I'll let my son work the P.A..... | BSS::STPALY::MOLLER | Fix it before it breaks | Tue Oct 06 1992 19:06 | 42 |
| The biggest problems that I've had relate to when we were only playing
1 hour or so out of a whole evening. Typically, most people who do
sound are familiar with the bands set up. My MIDI based band has only a
few signal feeds and they have all sorts of signals mixed in with them;
there is no real drums, but the drums (a Roland MT-32 and U-110) come
from different sources and have to be mixed correctly. The U-110 also
provides horns (as does the MT-32). So when I have complementary sounds
coming from seperate feeds, that are all mixed using MIDI CC7 (done by
a sequencer), you can't tweek individual instruments. When I played
at the state fair 2 years ago, I spent the time to get a good mix and we
marked everthing. I worked with the sound person and explained everything
- he marked down details on a clip board; I thought that this was great.
We were playing alternate hours at the Budwiser Beer tent (by the way,
this plays 0 dollars; it's all show case). We get ready for our set, and
the sound person is gone. Turns out that he wanted to take his kid for
ride on some of the fair rides & take in the scenery. We end up with his
15 year old son & pregnant wife who haven't a clue (or the clipboard).
I had miked my Twin Reverb, and that's probably the only thing that was
set correctly for the first set. The sound people couldn't figure out
why tweeking one thing would screw up 6 other things (and it was like this
for an hour). What I really enjoyed was the blaring feedback from the monitors
which were either off or full blast.
The second set, we has the dad back again and it went a lot smoother, but
the monitors were never even close to usable. I plannned ahead tho, I have
a small 10 watt powered monitor that was ties to my rack so I could at least.
hear my queues. All this thru a 12,000 watt P.A. system. I have no idea
what we sounded like, but was nearly deaf from the monitor levels changing
around.
My last experiance with a total disaster of a sound person caused me to
re-route all of my signals to a single mixer and a single send. Sounds
stupid, but it has eliminated much of the imbalence problems that always
crop up when the sound person can't understand your setup and wants to tweek
things once you've started playing. I don't mean to be hard on sound people,
but I think that you have to supply your own sound person (one who knows
what's what) if you want a consistant sound - after all that's what the
music is all about - how you sound & if people can enjoy it.
Jens
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| 2603.4 | | KDX200::COOPER | I even use TONE soap !! | Tue Oct 06 1992 21:15 | 5 |
| Ya gotta learn to play with little or no monitors... Seems like a
way of life. I've gotten *so* used to it, that a bi-amped monitor
system screws me up ! I'm not USED to hearing what we do !!!
:)
|
| 2603.5 | you know the rest | TINCUP::MADDUX | no title yet blues | Tue Oct 06 1992 22:51 | 11 |
| We play without monitors most of the time. Big festivals always have
monitors - and usually pretty good sound, but it can be inconsistent.
We played a festival down in Pueblo last June. The first set on
Saturday morning wasn't great - we were the second band and the sound
system was in pretty bad shape. By evening though after an entire day
of bluegrass the sound guys had dialed it in and it was great! You
could hear every instrument perfectly - it was like listening to
an album, the monitor mix was so good. The band can't help but
play better. Monitors, Can't live with 'em... can't shoot 'em.
|
| 2603.6 | | LUNER::KELLYJ | Don't that sunrise look so pretty | Wed Oct 07 1992 07:29 | 17 |
| For Jens:
Would it be possible for you to DECwrite a block diagram for your rig
so that a sound company would understand better what the signal flow
is?
When you're a sound company doing 12 acts/day at a festival, there's a
*lot* of information to get processed. The sound company typically
sets up kind a baseline rig and then adjusts as necessary for each act.
Now you show up with something that's not drums/bass/gtr/gtr/sax/vox in
the middle of a hectic day and life can get complicated.
In your case, the sound engineer should have been banished to mixing
elevator music for leaving the board and not leaving the information.
BTW, was your vocal mic' the one that was feeding back?
|
| 2603.7 | | BSS::STPALY::MOLLER | Fix it before it breaks | Wed Oct 07 1992 15:14 | 45 |
| -< I don't expect miracles >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Would it be possible for you to DECwrite a block diagram for your rig
> so that a sound company would understand better what the signal flow
> is?
Actually everything comes out of a single feed now, so there is only one
channel for anyone to mix. This includes all microphones. It sure simplified
things. I agree that the communication between the person working the sound
and the band is important. My experiance has been that many sound people
are used to working a very specific set up, and when you give them something
that they are not familar with (in this case, premixed sounds - I couldn't
seperate them if my life depended on it - where comlementary sounds are
from different feeds), they can screw it up real bad. Another experiance
was where someone decided to turn on compression on everything (this
happened a Laura-Belles, a blues club in Colorado Springs), then jack
all of the volumes up so everything was highly compressed - again, someones
freind was operating the sound system as a favor to a club - this was for
a benifit & the sound person did a great job with the Blues bands that he
was familiar with. My band wasn't the only ones who's sound was destroyed,
a frend of mine (in the band 'Head Full Of Zombies' - a new wave group that
is very popular around town) had no vocals and so much bass that you
could barely hear the live drummer. Again, having fun with the P.A. systems
on board compressors.
I simply won't allow my sound to be screwed up again. The last benifit that
I played for, I brought my own P.A. and mixed it myself - we sounded much
better than the following acts (someones friend was working the house
sound board that night & having a wonderful time patching in the digital
reverb to random microphones - I was quite happy to not have had his help).
> In your case, the sound engineer should have been banished to mixing
> elevator music for leaving the board and not leaving the information.
We have no idea what we sounded like. We decided never to allow this to
happen again. At the time we were fairly shaken by the experiance trying
to figure out what we had done wrong - It wasn't us.
> BTW, was your vocal mic' the one that was feeding back?
At the time, there were 3 singers, and we did know which one was causing
the problem. It could have been the microphone on my Twin Reverb for
all that I know.
Jens
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