Getting The Mix

I've agreed to participate in a one off performance to raise money for Help The Heroes. Basically its an evening of Rock Classics which to be fair are mainly guitar based tracks where the keyboard is a minor support. However its that loud that I can't hear a thing I`m playing and can hardly here the vocals.

My experience listening to live music is that most pub bands are way too loud compared to a real pro band. Not much we can do about the drummer but does anyone have any realistic advice on how a band should aproach getting the mix right?

Ant

[James Oakwood]

The comments below are not about getting the mix right but about getting the overall sound better accomodating room/hall resonances. To get the mix right you need a good mixer guy sat at a reasonably average position and of course taking up valuable dancing area BUT to get the best sound in a given room read on...

I am no expert but I remember a company called Klark Teknik had a box of tricks for use when setting up live bands or PAs. The idea being that room acoustics needed to be compensated for by altering the eq levels at specific frequencies in the spectrum.

The kit used a calibrated microphone (to listen to the output from the PA) and it had a pink-noise generator to feed into the inputs to the PA. The main part of the kit was a display that showed the dBs of each third-octave band of the spectrum from 20Hz to 20kHz.

So then ya switched on the pink noise and the microphone would tell ya what it is receiving - if you were real close to the PA speakers, room resonances were hardly noticeable - if the mic was 20 foot away then the composite spectrum hitting the mic would show you where room resonances were and you could tweak a graphic equalizer (connected just prior to the PA) to reduce or enhance the spectrum to make it sound like "flat" pink noise.

I think a lot of the bigger bands used this kit to improve the sound i.e. make it less prone to room resonances and microphone feedback and generally emit a sound that is desirable.

Of course, in a different part of the room (near the toilets down a longish corridor) the sound would probably not be improved at all BUT if you "calibrated" the sound using the graphic equalizer with the mic positioned roughly at an average position for the "crowd" then significant improvements were made i.e. better listener experience (unless you were drunk) and vocal/drum mics less prone to feedback.

Andy

[KtA]

Are you going thru a PA Ant?

If you are then it's up to the guy behind the desk.

If your'e not...it's every man for himself

Just make sure the volume on your keyboard amp goes up to 11

[Disfunktional-DJs]

if you don't have a sound engineer, then it's a case of doing a sound check.
and telling the guitarist to shut the fcuk up for 5 mins.

setting up Bass guitar and drums normally works best, first.
then vocals. make sure there is a good balance between them 3 first.

then add keyboards and and ask the singer to check again as she/he may need more head room.

lastly, tell/ask the guitarist to turn his amp right down and bring it up till he's balanced....chances of getting him not to out blast you all is depending on his ego...guitarists and singers egos are normally the power happy of the bunch.

[LIQUID]

Originally Posted by Disfunktional-DJs

...guitarists and singers egos are normally the power happy of the bunch.

You have the nub of the problem perfectly expressed.

Thanks for the advice chaps I`ll see if I can influence them in some small way but I suspect I`m wasting my time