biguana - 22 February 2010 02:01 PM
Thanks for the info on DIs and preamps - I'm understanding a little more, and more about exactly how much I do in fact need to know at this stage! I'll get an ART Tube MP for the moment and see what it does to my hats, then take it from there.
Nice to see things are beginning to click.
Played my second electronic gig on Friday, and it went pretty well drum-wise in that the sound man could mix my hats, snares and kicks nicely. It threw up a problem though:
Good stuff, here comes the 'but'.
The desk had 16 inputs, and some of them were 'set aside' for the acoustic drums that were being used by one band that night. The sound man said he wouldn't be able to use them for my drums as he didn't have time to make the necessary adjustments between sets. We ended up with not quite enough. I lost the mic on my acoustic hats, and our singer lost the effects on her vocals. We coped ok in that the venue was small enough for my hats to be heard anyway, and we had to use the effects on the desk for the vocals (not nearly as good). So we played our set but it's a situation I want to avoid happening again.
It's good that you are adaptable, you often need to be. You can't always get what you want (as the Rolling Stones I believe once said).
Perhaps when you are further up the bill, they will bend more to your demands.
My view on this situation, "there is no such word as can't".
I would have tried to find at least some compromise.
I have 24 channels to work with, so perhaps I'm spoilt for choice.
I have 8 drum channels just for drums:
Kick, Snare, 3 toms, hi-hat, 1 or 2 overheads.
This is fine for 90% of the drums I deal with.
Double kick drums would be an issue, you can get away with pairing toms on a mic.
'The big boys' would have perhaps 2 mics for a kick, 2 on the snare (top head , bottom head) a mic on each tom, a mic on the hi-hat, one on the ride, and perhaps 2 or 3 overheads for the cymbals.
I would hate to think how many Neil Peart uses.
The sound guy was really helpful, and I chatted to him afterwards vis a vis whether there could be any scope for us increasing the number of inputs to the PA by supplying a submixer, to sit, as it were, on the soundperson's lap, and be controlled by him/her. He said that would be fine were it not for the fact that you'd have to have leads running from the drums on stage to the submixer with the soundsmith in his/her little booth.
Not impossible, depends on their multicore arrangements. They might not be able to access the back of the desk too easily. Fine in a portable set-up, not so easy on an install.
You could invest in your own desk / multicore. Would be costly, and there's the hassle of laying out the multicore, needs to be out of the way (health & safety), and secured. So it means getting there early, and usually having to wait till it's all done at the end of the night to rescue your multicore cable.
If you are disciplined enough, you could mix yourselves on stage. You send a stereo pair (not all rigs run stereo), or a bunch of grouped outs so the main sound guy has some control over what's fed to the main rig.
Now I actually haven't a clue how sound desks work, never having actually looked beyond the DI box I am presented with, but I'm guessing the inputs to the desk go under the floor/through the walls or something and resurface on stage where you plug the instruments in. I'm going to be very embarrassed if this assumption is wrong. Anyway, later on I thought hang on - could you not leave the desk settings for the channels you have set aside for acoustic drums intact - just send the electronic drums down those channels from the stage but 'interrupt' them with a four channel submixer after they have resurfaced with the soundster but before they go into the desk?
You are correct, a multicore and stagebox (sometimes called 'ties') link what's on stage to the FOH desk.
As I said, it may or may not be possible to access the connection prior to it entering the desk.
Failing that, if you could only get the inputs to the submixer, I would have thought there'd be some way of plugging that mixer in as an auxiliary input to the PA, independent of the 16 channels on the sound desk. So I thought - radio transmitter? Is there some way of converting the signal coming from my four outputs into a radio signal that gets picked up again by the submixer? This is what we do to get my monitor mix and click into my in-ears, after all.
Not impossible to use radio, thing about wireless stuff, it uses a lot of wires:
You still need audio connections, so you would have
electronic source -->cable-->transmitter. Receiver --> cable --> mixer (+power supply) for each channel.
Then there's the chance that someone (or thing) will be on the same frequency.
I don't think it would be practical...
Any thoughts on that?
This is getting really outlandish now. At least we're not syncing the sound with a video projector mounted on the ceiling of the venue like the band on before us were...
Well not yet anyway..
