Al Krow

Still struggling with my WL-20 in terms of range at quite a few gigs. Seems to need line of sight (which ties in with @BassAdder60's comment above) and even then the range is often not great - just a few metres tops before it's cutting out. I also agree with the Lekato WS-50 adding a bit of distortion which actually can be noticeable depending on the bass and on the board pre its interacting with. So I guess my hope is currently being pinned on the Nux C5RC 5.8GHz which I need to try out at some forthcoming gigs. I've been tempted by the new Shure GLDX16+ but it's £spendy which might be ok if it did everything else brilliantly. I'd however recommend watching the following review before parting with £500+ on that system:

@peteb Hmmm...kinda amusing to find a post in which I find myself going both "yes, 100%!" and then in the next breath "oh really?!" : "There is a shortage of singers who can really deliver on stage, both male and female." YUP AGREED! "There is an added disadvantage for girls in that they tend to learn to drive later than guys..." WHAT ARE YOU BASING THIS STATEMENT ON? "There is also the added issue that performing music has always been tended to be a male dominated world throughout the ages, be it in a rock and roll band, a jazz ensemble, an orchestra or a medieval group of strolling players. Don't get me wrong, there have always been female musicians who have been successfully involved in playing music, but they have to have a 'one of the boys' attitude and to be able to hang to cut it in a band. If they are too girly or easily offended, then they've got no chance." SURE, THAT WAS TRUE HISTORICALLY AND MAYBE ALSO STILL TRUE IF THEY'RE FRONTING A MALE BAND. BUT THERE ARE PLENTY OF VERY SUCCESSFUL GIRL GROUPS AND FEMALE SOLO STARS OUT THERE, IN FACT SOME OF THE BIGGEST ACTS ON THE PLANET RIGHT NOW ARE WOMEN. AND BEING "EASILY OFFENDED" ISN'T JUST LIMITED TO WOMEN IS IT? "What you need in a singer is someone who is a genuine musician, rather than just someone who happens to have a half-decent voice. This applies to both males and females..." AGREED! "...but it is undoubtedly rarer for girls." REALLY?! YOU CHECKED THE OUTPUT OF THE MAJOR MUSIC COLLEGES WHO ARE PRODUCING VERY TALENTED VOCALISTS AND MUSICIANS EACH YEAR? "Having said that, I have played in bands with several girl singers who do just fine..." YUP, WELL NO SURPISE THERE!

Appears to have a different set of sounds from the SY-1000 (and obviously the SY-200)? Its keys and horn emulation on guitar are frankly amazing. Liking the form factor too! Could see it being a lot of creative fun for originals bands. Dunno if there's going to be enough usable sounds for a covers band where the bass player needs to be providing the usual bass lines rather than wandering off into interesting and varied soundscapes, and getting glares from their bandmates.

I guess this thread is making me realise just how much I should be grateful for the excellent, committed female lead vox we have in our band and the privelege of being in the large and diverse talent pool that living in the big smoke, provides.

This looks amazing, certainly what it can do with a guitar! Be interested to find out a bit more about how useful / it sounds with bass (there's a short bass section at around 07:15 on the clip).

Cheers Tim. Actually there's a pretty low risk of bass guitar bleed via kick drum mic for us, as my bass is routed purely through FoH via the desk and we are using IEMs for monitoring. So I guess that gives us a little more freedom to go for a more "text book" approach.

@TimR - thanks. Our desk hpf kicks in at 100Hz and I also do have a Thumpinator available to use which has a steep cut of -24dB/octave from 28Hz to get rid of sub-sonic crud. Appreciate this maybe a bit of a side-track, but in terms of getting the kick drum & bass guitar to sit together nicely in the mix, I came across this from Sweetwater recently, which I found helpful and we've since been broadly following, to the extent allowed by our relatively unsophisticated desk 3 band EQ which is centred at bass: 60Hz, mids (var) 140Hz to 3 KHz and treble 12 KHz "A common trick to getting a unified sound between kick and bass while retaining clarity is to boost the lows on the kick (60-80Hz) cut the low-mids anywhere from 150Hz to 400Hz (sometimes called the mudrange) and boost the highs at around 3000Hz. This will provide a solid low end, remove some of the mud in the midrange and accentuate the attack of the kick pedal on the drum. For the bass, we do pretty much the opposite; cut the lows where you boosted them on the kick (60-80Hz) boost the bass at around 120 – 150Hz which will provide a full bass sound (while occupying the frequency space we made by cutting the kick drum in this range), and boost the highs at around 900Hz since bass also provides information in that range as well. In short, we are emphasizing the frequencies that are important to the sound of each, while cutting the frequencies where they can conflict." Applying the above we would hpf the bass guitar and not the kick drum - but the principle seems to be to do it to one not the other, so if doing it the other way around works for you then great. But your point about hpf'ing all the vocal mics and in our case extending that to keys and electric guitar is a very good one - I've just put that through on our desk ready for the next gig on Sat 🙂

Indeed! Although we will most likely need one at most two parametric EQs for live use.

We do have an hpf / low cut on each channel on the desk. Would you recommend using it for every instrument and mic though? Or would you want to leave the kick drum untrammelled by an hpf (low cut)? As we use in-ears the issue of monitor placement is fortunately not a concern for us. The issue I've raised in the OP is not venue specific. We do seem to be getting the hang of avoiding feedback issues, even when our singer is making the most of her (Sennheiser) wireless mic to wander out front and engage with the audience - I guess that's maybe down her excellent mic control and switching off/angling the mic to minimise the potential for feedback.

Per the manual: "Each of the 10 frequency bands is fully adjustable over the audio spectrum of 20Hz to 20kHz. Additionally, the filter frequencies used on Channel 1 can be completely different than those used on Channel 2. All of these filter adjustments are saved per preset." Very cool!

@Baloney Balderdash is it the case that the EQ centre points on the SA EQ2 on the face of the pedal display are not fixed if it is fully parametric i.e. you can select whatever EQ centre points you want and not have to stick to the 31Hz, 62Hz, 125Hz etc. centre points?

That's really helpful, thank you! Was there a typo in your last sentence when you said: "in fact also no combination of graphic and parametric equalizing" - I couldn't quite follow that bit?

@JoeEvans - nice solution to the very valid point @BigRedX raised about needing a mic level input / XLR format. I've spotted that several EQ pedals also provide an EQ boost which could be a neat way of getting there with one piece of kit and keeping costs/and the amount of additional gear down? I note that the Source Audio EQ2 has a +12dB volume boost and also provides a combination graphic and parametric equalizer with 10 fully adjustable frequency bands and up to 8 onboard presets (And the ability to simultaneously run two tailored EQ settings which can be independently routed to either stereo output).

Cheers guys - if it were only so simple a fix! 😊 She's actually got superb mic control as might be expected from a professional singer doing both solo and band work and which I saw in action at the wedding we were playing at on Sat. The one thing I was able to adjust on the desk over the weekend, was to give her mid EQ a boost at around 200Hz, which is bang smack in the middle of her lower vocal range. I'm going to bake that into the desk settings going forward and then hopefully we can put in some time for a technical rehearsal in the near future as @BigRedX quite rightly suggested.

Sure - as you say it's an obvious thing and therefore something that we very much already do. I'd say 90% of our songs fall into her comfortable range category because we also make sure to change key where that's an easy fix. But in 4 hours+ of set material there are going to be a few songs where the vocal range goes outside her (or frankly most singer's) comfort zone. Equally if she's depping for other bands then there may be a few songs that aren't ideal for her vocal register. So if we can find a technical fix for this, it also opens up more some excellent material for our band which straddle the alto and soprano ranges. So it's about widening the choice of rep that we're able to do.

Cheers BRX, that's helpful. The only thing that comes to mind is the Source Audio EQ2 with that sort of capability in a pedal.

Now why did I somehow expect you to be rousting from your slumber at the very mention of the C word? 😅

We do have male BVs, but some songs e.g. the intro to Fleetwood Mac Go your own way don't really lend themselves to that with our set up. Hoping that once we've come up with a solution there shouldn't be too much faffing though ie it will be a permanent "set and forget".

Yup understand where you're coming from, but she's a very experienced and formally trained singer with plenty of stage experience, and also a professional vocal coach herself 😊 The issue with a compressor is its impact on dynamic range and potentially also vocal timbre - the ability for her to let fly at the top end is not something we want to lose. My sense from the research I've done is that EQ'ing vocals rather than applying an across the board compression seems to be a more common route, but generally cutting rather than boosting certain frequencies to get an overall better vocal sound is the more common approach, which unfortunately doesn't address the specific feature we have here.

A singer I work closely with is a soprano and she finds her vocal strength/power/volume considerably diminishes below a certain pitch, which is in an alto's comfort zone (165Hz to 330 Hz range). We deal with this with a lot of our material simply by taking the key we are playing in up to suit her vocal register, but there are some songs that span quite a pitch range and taking them up inkey would make the top end too high. We don't have the luxury of a sound engineer for our gigs and making volume adjustments on the fly and trying to dial that in just for the low register and then cutting back when she hits the higher notes is not going to be practical in a live setting. So ideally we'd like to come up with a "set and forget" option to give her a volume boost just in her lower range. Our desk is decent, but not amazing in terms of its channel strip EQ, which is 3 band. We do have a variable mids-boost/cut which we could set at 200Hz and maybe give that a 3dB to 6dB boost - will be giving that a try. I'm a little reluctant to be cutting the mids for the other instruments (other than maybe the kick drum) as we would lose the mid-punch for guitar & bass. Just also wondering if an EQ pedal (e.g. the Boss EQ200) would add some value given that it will offer multiple EQ points? Be very interested to get your thoughts if this is an issue you've come across and solved - I'm aware a fair few on BC have far more in-depth sound engineering expertise than I do!

Still this ^^! 😁

I've had both the 735A and 1025 and agree 100% with this^^!

FWIW - pushed the button on an Aguilar OBP3 in pref. to a Glock 3 band this time around. The Aggie seems to edge it in terms of +/- dB and frequency centre points. It will also be good to have a choice of mid cut / boost at 400Hz and 800Hz too (there's a switch option to deal with your allergy issues, Tom), rather than the theoretically cool but, in practice, never used NE1 module for mids on the BB2005.

I think maybe better to say it's "do-able but bloody hard!". I'm aware of a couple of other BC'ers, other than @casapete, @spencer.b and @Bluewine from this thread, and a couple of bass players not on this forum (god forbid, haha!) who are managing to be "purely pro" bass players. A few of them are in successful function bands collectively making £60K to £80K PA and one was a session bass player who did 300+ gigs a year, but who's recently decided to get a 9 to 5. My lot should be getting a decent chunk of cash per head each this and next year from pub and function gigs with a fair wind, and our lead singer can double what she gets from the band with solo gigs, but she would be the only one managing to live off her music performance and then only just; the rest of us have other jobs/sources of income which are still our main income. To the OP: I think there's a romance to being a full time pro musician. But the reality I suspect is that it's often gruelling, bloody hard work, with anti-social hours. Albeit, if it's something we love, it can be some of the best gruelling bloody-hard work we ever spend our time doing.

Wonderful story, thank you! I've often wondered how strict a "no substance abuse" policy bands should have, given the prevalence of drugs and alcohol in society and particularly the rock 'n' roll scene? So it's illuminating hearing about the damage it can do, as it's not widely spoken about or shared, but I guess that's a whole different thread and a complete side-track on this one... In terms of your acoustic duo, what is the set up on that in terms of instrumentation and vocals? (Any YT footage?)