Cheap Advice On Music

I have been running sound for a mostly-acoustic oldies band known as Rusty Strings since the band’s inception in 2005. At a gig, typically in a club or restaurant, the first part of my job consists of setting up the mixer, power amp, and effects boxes, running the snake to the playing area, and hooking up the instruments and vocal microphones to the snake. During the show, I adjust the mixer faders as needed to keep the sound balanced and respond to requests from the band for level changes in the monitors. Afterwards, I detach and stow all the cables and disconnect and pack up all the PA stuff before heading for home.

Obviously, all of the really big bands have a “sound man,” usually several. Sometimes there is even a separate person and mixing position just for the (individual) monitors! At the other extreme, an individual person singing and playing an electrified acoustic guitar in a small club could get by with an onstage amp and a small mini-mixer that he or she could adjust as needed right from the playing position. (I have also seen this kind of arrangement used by duos.) In between these opposite poles is a large gray area where having a sound man would be nice, but may or may not be necessary.

Of course, sometimes the venue has a built-in sound system and will provide someone to set it up for you. I will tell you, though, that in all of the dozens of places we have played in these three years, there has been exactly one club with a sound system already installed and someone to help us set up. So, we never assume that this will be the case. Read the rest…

For the last several years I have been running sound for a central Ohio two-guitars-and-keyboard oldies band known as Rusty Strings. We started out using a Kustom KPM8420 powered mixer and have recently upgraded to a setup with a separate mixer, effects unit, and power amp. One of the issues we have had to deal with is whether to run the guitars and keyboard through the PA along with the vocals, or leave them out of the PA and rely on onstage amps for the instrument sound.

The main guitars are acoustics with pickups. We decided to use the pickups rather than miking the guitars themselves in order to avoid problems with feedback and leakage. (The tradeoff is that the pickup sound can be somewhat different from the actual sound of the guitar, but unless you are Andrés Segovia this probably doesn’t matter.)

When we first started playing, typically in restaurants and at parties, we ran everything through the PA - the two guitars, the keyboard, and three vocals. On some songs, one of the guitarists switches to bass, so we ran that through the PA as well. The onstage amps (small “combo” type units) were putting out some sound, but the audience was basically hearing everything through the PA.

The connections themselves were straightforward. One of the guitar amps has a direct output in the back, so we ran that straight to the PA. For the other guitar, we put a DI (direct input) box between the effects unit and the amp and ran its output to the PA. The keyboard was sent to the PA through another DI box and also separately to an onstage amp, using the L and R keyboard outputs. (Make sure all the keyboard voices are mono if you do this!)

One of the main problems with this whole approach, it turns out, is that it uses up a lot of PA power. When everyone was playing and everyone was singing, the PA was really straining. When the bass was in there, the Kustom really just couldn’t handle it. I remember one gig where a guy who “knew about sound” came up to me during a set to report that one of our main speakers had a “tear” in it and was sounding really bad. Panicked, we checked it out at the next break, but it was fine. What our knowledgable friend was actually hearing was good old PA overload distortion, plain and simple. Read the rest…