Post by JohnH on May 22, 2011 17:43:54 GMT -5
I quite like reading about peoples gigs and PA rigs, so I’m hoping some may be interested in ours.
Our band only gigs occasionally, but this weekend we had a lot of fun playing at a birthday party on a rural property. The venue was outside, and we set up under a shed roof, open at front and one side. Although it’s winter here, it was a clear night and not too cold, so a couple of fire barrels provided warmth.
There are five of us, with drums, bass, keyboard and two guitars. Three of us sing, and my part is rhythm guitar and vocals, plus general electrical issues.
The heart of our system is our 30 year-old 12 channel mixer. Since the last time it was out, it has had all new channel faders (bought for a good price from HK), and a fix for what our soundman called the ’Pot of Death’, the auxiliary send control that, being scratchy, was becoming open-circuit and being in a feedback loop, was defaulting to infinite gain, resulting in very loud explosive noises!.
Also at the mixer, we used a guitar delay pedal in the aux loop to mix in some echo/reverb effects (like on ‘Comfortably Numb’, “Is there anybody out there..there..there.....”).
We have a 12+4 multi-core snake with a stage box, which lets us set up the mixer back in the audience area – it keeps everything neat and I wouldn’t know how to manage without it.
Microphones all plug into the stage box, including mics for the guitar amps, bass drum and snare drum. DI is used for the keyboard, my acoustic guitar and from the bass rig. The main FOH output comes from two 400W x 15” active speakers.
We have one foldback channel, for vocals and acoustic. This time, we had this running into my Crate Powerblock, acting purely as a clean power amp, then into three foldback speakers, two small ones at the front for the three singers, and a larger one at the back for the drummer and keys player. Each speaker was probably able to get up to about 35W with this, but we were not limited by headroom. Another new thing this time was a Sabine Feedback destroyer on the foldback. This clever device tunes into each howling feedback frequency during setup, and surgically removes up to 12 such screeches, with a 1/10th octave notch. You can hardly hear any difference to the sound, but then the foldback level can be raised. This really helped to make the sound clear for the players.
And the whole rig, amps and all was plugged into one double wall socket, with a tree of power boards into power boards (don’t try this at home, try it at somebody else’s home instead!). A quick estimate was that adding up all the power draws, we were taking 6 to 8 amps max – just OK with care and equivalent to not more than one electric bar heater with both bars on.
One ground loop was evident, due to the DI from the bass rig – fixed with a ground lift on the signal cord (all mains grounds maintained).
So we played about 30 songs, going back over the last few decades, we had a lot of fun and had good comments from all ages, daughters, mothers and grandmothers too.
Cheers
John
Our band only gigs occasionally, but this weekend we had a lot of fun playing at a birthday party on a rural property. The venue was outside, and we set up under a shed roof, open at front and one side. Although it’s winter here, it was a clear night and not too cold, so a couple of fire barrels provided warmth.
There are five of us, with drums, bass, keyboard and two guitars. Three of us sing, and my part is rhythm guitar and vocals, plus general electrical issues.
The heart of our system is our 30 year-old 12 channel mixer. Since the last time it was out, it has had all new channel faders (bought for a good price from HK), and a fix for what our soundman called the ’Pot of Death’, the auxiliary send control that, being scratchy, was becoming open-circuit and being in a feedback loop, was defaulting to infinite gain, resulting in very loud explosive noises!.
Also at the mixer, we used a guitar delay pedal in the aux loop to mix in some echo/reverb effects (like on ‘Comfortably Numb’, “Is there anybody out there..there..there.....”).
We have a 12+4 multi-core snake with a stage box, which lets us set up the mixer back in the audience area – it keeps everything neat and I wouldn’t know how to manage without it.
Microphones all plug into the stage box, including mics for the guitar amps, bass drum and snare drum. DI is used for the keyboard, my acoustic guitar and from the bass rig. The main FOH output comes from two 400W x 15” active speakers.
We have one foldback channel, for vocals and acoustic. This time, we had this running into my Crate Powerblock, acting purely as a clean power amp, then into three foldback speakers, two small ones at the front for the three singers, and a larger one at the back for the drummer and keys player. Each speaker was probably able to get up to about 35W with this, but we were not limited by headroom. Another new thing this time was a Sabine Feedback destroyer on the foldback. This clever device tunes into each howling feedback frequency during setup, and surgically removes up to 12 such screeches, with a 1/10th octave notch. You can hardly hear any difference to the sound, but then the foldback level can be raised. This really helped to make the sound clear for the players.
And the whole rig, amps and all was plugged into one double wall socket, with a tree of power boards into power boards (don’t try this at home, try it at somebody else’s home instead!). A quick estimate was that adding up all the power draws, we were taking 6 to 8 amps max – just OK with care and equivalent to not more than one electric bar heater with both bars on.
One ground loop was evident, due to the DI from the bass rig – fixed with a ground lift on the signal cord (all mains grounds maintained).
So we played about 30 songs, going back over the last few decades, we had a lot of fun and had good comments from all ages, daughters, mothers and grandmothers too.
Cheers
John