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Joined:
October 2005
Posts: 4073
Location: Utah | The girls have landed a nice little restaurant gig, every Wednesday night from 6-9pm. Pays real money plus food, too.
The stage has a basic Peavey PA system that I haven't gotten to play with or get a good look at. It doesn't look very sophisticated, and there is no big board. Maybe just a two or 4 channel amp with 3 band EQ. The quality of the sound is questionable, based on the sound Saturday night when they played there. It was used for vocals and sounded pretty muddy.
The girls will provide mics, guitars, keyboard, etc. They each have a good 2 channel acoustic amp that will take their O and a vocal mic. Both amps have a balanced line out.
My gut feeling is to just plug in their guitars and mics into their amps and run it that way. Volume levels will be fairly low, so we could play with EQ here at the house and get some baselines before arriving at the restaurant on the first Wednesday of October.
Alternatively, we could run the balanced lines out from the amps to the PA. This would allow them to use their amps as monitors, though monitors weren't used on Saturday and they didn't complain. The advantage would be that I could twiddle knobs on the PA from the side of the stage, so I wouldn't have to go to the stage front to make adjustments or somehow signal them what adjustments to make. Since I haven't messed with this PA, it is a bit of an unknown what I'll be dealing with, which worries me.
Another option that would give more control would be to run their guitars and mics into a 4 channel mixer that we use for home recording. Those outputs could run to their amps. Such a setup would give individual control over each instrument and mic, including EQ and volume. The downside is that it gets away from KISS, and requires buying some more cables. The upside is that we could do some live recording off of the mixer, which would be fun to do sometime down the road.
My main concern is that we get them up and running successfully while there are customers already eating in the restaurant. So what would you do? KISS and run it all through their amps? Take a chance on the PA? Mess with the mixer? Have a beer and let the girls figure it out? | |
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Joined:
November 2005
Posts: 1126
Location: Omaha, NE | To me "simple" means "least amount to haul". With that in mind, my gut reaction would be to bring the mixer with you and run that through the PA. Saves lugging individual amps, and gives you a single point of sound control.
If you get the chance, go take a look at the Peavey and find out what you are working with. Worst case is someone installed a vocal PA (like you might use in a meeting room) which would be useless for music. But odds are its fine.
Anyway, that's what I'd do. If you can't get the sound you want, then try something else the second week. | |
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Joined:
September 2004
Posts: 777
Location: East Wenatchee, WA | We have a small Peavey powered mixer at church (8 or 9 channel...can't recall) and we only use a couple of really cheap 10" mains with it (we are a small group of 50 or so people). Getting a decent sound without feedback (no monitors) was a challenge at first, but found that by doing an inverted EQ with lows and highs flat, and mid's dropped way down, the Adamas, keyboard and vocals sound fairly decent.
In your situation, I would also go with your home mixer which probably has better eq capability, then dump that into the house PA. EQ the house PA as I mentioned above, then add mid's as much as you need to bring out the vocals and guitar. It will work. Of course you could also just buy a Bose L1 and not worry about it any more. | |
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How would you skin this cat (metaphorically speaking)