I am in a two piece and we play a lot of shows in venues that are mostly set up on for bands (lots of mics, few DIs). But we are a two piece with four synths and a drum machine and two vocals.
We’re just getting started (maybe 4 gigs under our belts), but we struggle with good monitoring and house sound (according to experienced friends in the audience).
I was looking at getting a mixer that we can just provide a stereo pair to FOH and outs for our monitors. So essentially we need a Monitor Engineer, but I was wondering how other people do this.
Are you providing just a stereo pair to FOH? Mono? Are you setting low end instruments to their own channel so kick and bass can be mixed separately?
I want to be a drama-free act for any venue and I’m trying to figure out if what I can put on my Spec Sheets.
All of this assumes that I’ve done a good job balancing my patches and synths and backing tracks and giving the separate tracks their own brickwall limiters.
And perspective is appreciated; I just want to provide the best sound to the audience and the easiest job to the FOH engineer.
…if u don’t have ur own foh engineer, u better provide a stereo sum that feeds a classic stagebox which feeds the foh mixer…
so u need to provide ur very own stage mix via ur own mixer…
usually the foh will provide a monitormix, which is nothing but the same summed up signal ur sending to it…
but all this is far away from set and forget…
especially if u even come along with two independent vocal lines…
that get’s pretty hard to handle in one stereo sum…
never the less, keep an eye on ur low end and low mids…that’s always the biggest challenge in all sorts of rock venues…less is more here…the foh guy can always push ur sum in that frequency area a little…but if he/she’s forced to tame it, it gets messy…
so get ur own mixer and practice ur set upfront and get some total recall options/work arounds/routines to put ur trust in…
or send a stage rider upfront, that details all ur elements u wanna send to foh, so the venue can provide the stage inputs u gonna need and then u put ur trust on the foh engineer of that night…
Two anecdotes:
I used to play in a band with two laptop players, two vocalists, drummer and bass player. Each electronic performer summed their sources (mostly just a laptop + interface, but I had a synth going into my laptop). The output from each performer was a stereo pair, into a DI, into the FOH mixer. We would bring all our own power strips, cables and, importantly, our own DIs. This way, the FOH could work with us like any other band. It helped that one electronic performer was a drummer (with real and electronic drums), and the other was a synth player… so we could be eq’d differently by the FOH.
In my current live project, we’re a gong player and synthesist. I have a mixer on stage with me, which sums a hand held mic from the gongs, my synth and an FX pedal. I’m only using a single mono out, so I don’t usually bring a DI (plus we tend to play “experimental” venues who’re more used to this madness). The gongs also go into normal stage mics. This thread has reminded me to put the DI in my gig bag.
In both cases, we would rely on the FOH for on-stage monitoring. They’re used to dealing with this with bands.
So… yes, bring something to sum your individual sources, but also let the FOH have some control over “instruments” or “groups” of sources. And bring your own DIs. Live engineers are (usually) on your side, even when they’re stressed and grumpy. Be nice to them, and also give them signals close to what they’re used to so they can do “mostly” the job they usually do.
Our goal with @MoeFerris is to have a set and forget situation without much soundcheck. We both have been making music for clubs for a long time and practice in a studio environment to hear our problems and work on them. In a club there is no FOH so good monitoring is essential. But most of the time it’s crap. I am switching to IEMs for that. Moe uses IEMs + an Ambient mic to hear what’s going on in the room too. We just go directly into a PA or DJ mixer and adjust problematic frequencies with the provided EQ. And it always worked really good tbh.
Hell yeah! Sign me up for that!
this sounds really important to have a physical set of controls so you can adjust the EQ or mix on the fly. I was looking at the Yamaha DM3, but maybe a regular analog mixer like the Korg Soundlink works better. Either sounds better than using an interface like my RME UCX II with a tablet.
I recently got a model 1.4 mixer. The sculpt eq really and the filters really do help to get a good sound
yeah, i can’t go with a mixer with just a stereo out. The Soundlink has Mains and 4 stereo bussess and 4 aux channels. That way I can give the FOH as much or as little as they want in terms of control.
thank you for the rec. i will investigate. i should get my BX-8 out and use as a submixer for the synths. hmmmm.
I was in a doom band that had two synth players on top of three guitars, bass, and drums. One synth player had two synths and an electribe. The other had a synth and a cd player for intros. We ran both of their setups in to a small mixer and sent a stereo signal to powered mackies that we used for our stage volume (which we’d throw the vocals into for house shows), then brought two DI boxes to send the stereo mix to FOH. Soundfolks saw our gear and got annoyed buy when we handed them two DIs and said “make the keys the same volume as the guitars” they became our best friends.
I’d sum the synths, keep the drum machine on a separate output, and let the sound engineer manage the vocals.
I’ve got quite a lot of experience running electronic shows with vocals, and having vocals running into your own processing and summed with other elements - good in theory - is a real headache in practice. Anything with a microphone is going to run into feedback issues that the tech will be better placed to control, and the audience are exquisitely sensitive to vocal levels, which can vary wildly in different rooms - so the settings that work in the practice room probably won’t at the venue.
Agreed. In my experience as a live sound engineer, onstage live vocal processing units are often a recipe for feedback problems.
I would say if you really want to effect/mix your own vocals onstage, try to arrange extra sound-checking time to iron out any issues. And have a backup plan if you can’t get it to work.