Phil Starr

I love the idea of insulting tape. Sounds a bit Harry Potter but something that reminded me of all my faults when I went to the mixer might be a good thing I have a box full of coloured leads I used when I ran a jam session/open mic. I carry spare batteries for all the bands various gadgets because they never check them. The trouble was a dep I'd only met half an hour before we went on and an unfamiliar mic. Which sounded awful btw, she sounded glorious once she used my mic. But... you are right, all my leads are marked but I've been encouraging the band to use their own leads to cut down the set up and knock down times and I've got complacent about nothing going wrong. Lesson learned

Sounds like you know what the issues are, that all makes sense and makes it easier for us to make suggestions and ultimately for you to find an answer. You've isolated the problem and the solution will follow. If it helps I have had similar issues with male vocalists, both with incredibly strong and good voices, one of them has a four octave range!! The trouble is that not all of that range sounds as nice as other bits. He can hit all the notes but there's no point hitting a high C if it clears the room. His mic technique is appalling. This sounds like she might be singing the wrong songs or singing them in the wrong key for her voice. Alternatively she may have poor mic technique. Commonly singers go for extra volume on the notes they aren't confident singing, that's fine if they back the mic off a little for the high notes. On the low ones the easiest thing is to sing them quieter and use the mic's proximity effect to boost the low end. Your sound engineer may not have been diplomatic, it may be the simple truth and she has a fantastic voice but she needs the right mic. I'd prioritise talking to him first, he's actually heard the problem and almost certainly the experience to help. getting her in the studio and copying his settings sounds like an efficient and fun way to go and you'll get a decent demo out of it with any luck. It might save you a bit of money if you don't need to buy a fancy mixer to get the best out of her. Singers are also like bass players and guitarists, they have favourite songs they've always wanted to sing/play since they were 8 years old and won't let you take them out of the set even though they are just wrong for them. Good luck

So you've narrowed it down to the vocals sounding shrill, It could be so many things including the singers voice which may be great in some of their vocal range but not others. You may be singing in a key which is difficult for her and she may be out of tune in places Singers voices are said to work in a series of registers and there are crossover points where they have to shift registers, the point is these crossovers are the weak points where the vocal sound is least under control and can sound harsh. All voices have resonances and the mic may be picking that up too. can you record the performance and try and find out if the shrillness is all the time or just now and then. if so is it the same places in the same song every time? Come to that you can't hear the PA from behind so who is telling you it is shrill. To be honest I'd probably avoid telling the singer she is shrill though That really isn't going to end well. Shrill isn't really a very descriptive term, it describes too much upper mids to me but others will use differnt words. One thing you can do is to fill out the sound with extra low mids to make it sound richer and see how that works. You can sweeten a voice with some reverb and delay applied judiciously. Why not book a session with the singer to just tweak her voice on the mixer. If you optimse it through the monitors then you can pass that on to the FOH as well and the two of you will be working together to make her sound and feel good. I've done this with my own voice and since then with one of my singers and once they started it was actually a fun experience. If you don't have enough control on your mixer then short of buying a new one there are plenty of affordable pedals for voice enhancment https://www.thomann.de/gb/vocalists.html

I own the PA. I'm not sure anyone would want to play with me if I didn't

I'll kick off. This was a gig with my four piece Blackout City but with a last minute dep singer due to our Emily not being well. Pub was the Old Pier Tavern in Burnham-on-Sea great place for a band with a bit of a stage with plenty of space and a bit of a 'green room' and a loo behind the stage are so space to store all the guitar cases and bags after your've det up. PA was my trusty RCF 745's. Monitoring is usually just in-ears for all for of us but dep singer didn't use them so my RCF 310 served as her monitor. Normally only the guitarist uses any back line a 1x12 miked up for the PA and to be fair run at a fairly low level. last night I took a 1x10 with a Warwick Gnome just to add a little ambiance on stage for the singer. Sound check was 'interesting' until I remembered I'd been interrupted and hadn't connected the speakers to the mixer! Mixer is an RCF (again) M18 digital stagebox thingy. Plugged in and ready to go it sounded great from the off with the settings from the last gig. Floor monitor was run off the same feed our regular singer has set up for her in -ears. At her request I gave our dep a tiny bit of extra bass and guitar as Emily never really pushes in her in-ears and lets the stage sound filter through. I'm loving this set up, the 745's really cope with everything with plenty of reserve, I've never been able to run them flat out even outdoors yet. The opening sound is just there, no obvious nasties or artificiality and feeedback issues are really rare nowadays due to a smooth response. the eDrums sound massive. After the sound check a musician in the audience came up and asked me seriously where I'd placed the subs as he couldn't see them. At the same time being able to recall your best ever settings is so great and I no longer line check, I can see the mics and so on working and pick up any dodgy leaads just by looking at the VU's on every channel. I'm feeling very smug before things start to go wrong. Suddenly in the first song the mixer isn't working. I can turn things up and down on the iPad and nothings changing at the speakers. Panic, it's been acompletely reliable mixer for four years, not a twitch and now nothing works. Turned out I had my phone in my pocket and the Ipad had decided my iPhone was a better partner and had cut the connection to the mixer. It was probably only 30secs but God that seems a long time when everyone is watching you and waiting for the show to go on. Halfway though the set someone rushes up and says we can't hear the singer, and to be fair she's started to fade in my in ears. Our drummer's partner mixes for us and she had the iPad so I couldn't see what was going on so I'm gesturing to get the IPad back; eventually it comes up and she's about 20db down from where I set her level. She's got her own radio mic and the output was almost line level so I'd reset the gain. I'm getting nothing from the radio mic now so I toss her my mic and we just play, I'm now mic-less and of course its the song where I do the bulk of the bv's so I plug a spare mic into her channel and we do the song. Guitarist hasn't noticed and says my vocals are all he can hear in his in ears and turning me down won't work and he can't hear his own vocals. Well it won't work because I'm on the channel labelled Emily and he's adjusting the one labelled Phil. Fortunately someone takes her radio mic away and comes back with it fixed (the battery was flat) I discover I'd unplugged Rob's vocal mic in the confusion and we finish the gig with everything working. I need to calm down when things go wrong, and I need to think about re-labelling the mixer. At the worst moment I had four black mic leads and four empty sockets and no way of remembering which lead corresponded with which mic. On top of that my glasses were at the other end of the stage so I couldn't see very much. On the plus side Emma the dep singer sounded soooo much better through my mic (Sennheiser E935) and I'm going to add the same reverb and delay that I use to that channel for the next gig.

OK, an obvious knock off of the 'How was your gig last night' thread over in the general discussion. I suspect it'll be more along the lines of what went wrong but it might be good to share general experiences and a few pics of your set up.

It's worth understanding some of the reasons why 'home' sound is so different from 'live' sound. The first is room acoustics, homes generally offer smaller spaces and a lot more soft surfaces with shorter reverberation times and you'll generally be closer to the speaker so more of the sound is travelling direct to your ears. Big rooms with large reflective surfaces mean a lot of multiple pathways to your ears and lots of comb filtering. A second factor is the presence of other instruments in the mix, Kick drums and toms are 'competing' with your lower frequencies and guitar and vocals with your upper middle. You need to emphasize the frequencies left to you a bit to be heard and that lovely mid scooped sound you have at home isn't going to cut it, you need to boost the mids and probably cut the bass to clean up the band sound and be heard amongst the other instruments. Thirdly your PA will interfere with your sound. The vocal mics will pick up any backline and the drums and amplify them out front. There will be some inherent delay in this and you'll get interference between this and your backline cancelling some frequencies and emphasizing others. Standing behind the PA speakers you'll hear all the bass someone in the front row will hear at the same volume, everything else is directional so you won't hear the mids and tops and you'll be swamped in bass from both directions. A fourth problem is volume. At home 80db is reasonably loud and 90db very loud, at the gig you'll probably be opreating at 100db plus. The frequency response of our hearing changes with volume with louder sounds exagerating bass and treble. This might make the bass sound 5-8db louder depending upon which frequency is involved. I'll put a graph underneath to illustrate this. You get round this by rolling back the bass and treble or emphasisning the mids again if you want to carry your carefully constructed sound into a live gig. Live sound is a messy business and it's rally hard to be perfect every time as every room is different and even the people in the room change the acoustics.. You just have to be flexible and a good set of ears helps a lot.

I've moved entirely to using the PA for relaying my bass to the audience and your idea for taking your sound with you is an excellent one. Since you don't have FOH yet it makes sense to plan to put bass through the PA along with everything else right from the start. You can keep the sound levels on stage down to the reasonable levels you get in the rehearsal room. If you go out and gig with just vocal PA then you are going to have to turn up your backline a lot to reach everyone in the room and ironically louder on stage sound means you won't hear each other as well as you do at rehearsals. There's lots of other technical reasons why this is better sounding for the audience too. By planning this from the start you can save on upgrading everyone's back line and spend it on a better PA. So you only need your cab for on stage monitoring, keeping the sound from the rehearsal room. With one of my bands I use an RCF ART310 as a monitor fed from a Zoom or a SansAmp. I've also used the 310 as backline with PA support and in the rehearsal room as my only amplification and one has been loud enough for both me and the rest of the band to hear the bass clearly. I also have conventional bass rigs which I use less often and my 1x10 bass cab is usually enough there too, with PA doing the heavy lifting out front. The first rule of thumb is that you aren't going to get more bass out of a PA speaker than a bass speaker. Because of the horn you'll hear more clearly from the PA speaker than a bass speaker. Also you'll have to roll off the bass a few db as the PA speaker is designed to give a flat response up on a pole. Some PA speakers have a switch to do this so they can be used as floor monitors. I've moved on with two other bands to using in-ears. I play in both bands with the same drummer and she has an electronic kit so we don't need backline at all. If we have a dep drummer or singer who use a full kit or who won't use in ears I take my little 1x10 frfr set up and it's always been plenty. The great thing is that I can take the same bass sound I get in headphones or studio monitors with me to go out through the PA and on stage through a floor monitor or my bass rig. My experience is that even the ART 310 has been enough. I've used the QSC 12.2 and I have RCF745's which have also been recommended and they are great too, I've just never needed to go that loud. I only say this to say this is my experience, you play with different people and probably different music but for me a 1x10 PA speaker has always been good enough as my on stage sound.

Hey Michael there's a long thread on here somewhere which I think you referred to. My conclusion at the end was that Music Tribe had looked at a few amps and borrowed features from several of themand the result was more of a mash-up than a tribute act. It is what it is and we are maybe coming to different conclusions based with the same evidence. Those frequency choices may well be 'borrowed' and to be fair it looks like more than coincidence as it's an odd sequence 200,400,800,1600,3200 would be much less suspicious. Whether the circuitry is the same or if the Bugera would sound like an Ampeg I've no idea. I was just suggesting it as an '800W amp in the same price bracket as the Harley Benton.

I think that's more about the styling. I don't think Music Tribe actually clone stuff as such any more, if they ever did. Having said that there is definitely a looky-likey feel about it and once something new starts to sell well they will have their own version in short order. The power amp section in the Veyron is actually 'borrowed ' from one of the Behringer PA amps and there is nothing particularly remakable about the pre amp/control stages. In some ways Behringer seem to have become quite staid with well worn designs that they have made for years. I used a second hand EP2400 power amp 17 years agao and they still make it; rebranded as an EP4000. The INuke PA amps their first class D amps have just been repackaged as the NX series with a black case instead of the horrid silver ones. Their current strategy seems to be to buy up established brands, absorb their expertise and move manufacture to their factory complex in China.

Sorry I can't answer either question as I use a Zoom to do all that sort of thing and run everything at 12.00 on the Bugera which I chose as it has a flat response and I've gone FRFR. The Bugera is effectively being used as a power amp in bass amp format and the controls are backup should the Zoom go down. I did try it out of course when I first got it and everything works ok but I haven't touched the controls for years other than to adjust the volume. I deliberately chose the BV1001M as the most neutral amp I could find and that is what it does. @Chienmortbb may be able to help as he did some frequency response measurements on the amp.

Bugera Veyron? ignore the hype obviously, it isn't 2000W but it measures close to 800W and is solidly made.

I didn't pick this up when you posted it but I'm not surprised at what you noticed. I've not heard the HH's so no comment there. RCF have a huge range of speakers but within the ART series the numbering is at least consistent. The last two numbers give the size of the horn and the bass driver so x12 is a 1" throat horn with a 12" driver and an x35 has a 3" compression unit with a 15" bass driver. as you go from the 3xx series (now discontinued) to the 7xx series and 9xx series you get a better bass driver with a bigger magnet, more weight and higher efficiency. You'd expect better bass from the 9 series but a better midrange from the 932 compared with the 912. That ties in with @Al Krow s experience with his band's speakers

Amen

Amongst my collection of old mics I have a Sontronics STC80. Now discontinued I think it was the forerunner of the Solo but is a cardioid, one of the best sounding mics I have and probably the equal of the Sennheiser 935/945 at a lower price. If someone wants a good mic at a great price the Solo has to be a recommendation. They weigh a ton though

Ha ha, I'm not even going to contemplate trying to mix for you at a distance It does all look fine though given the limitations of your desk. I'm really cautious about adding in compression for live work, unless singers are really strong and you can keep the gain down it so often leads to feedback issues. If I was mixing FOH and not behind the speakers playing bass it would be fine because you can be on it quickly, but if you are mixing and playing it's just another headache. Back to the issue of over brightness I think you have to try the graphic on FOH first since you are pointing to the FOH speakers as the source of the problem. No harm in experimenting with it in the monitor mix at rehearsals though, obviously. If your singer is a real belter then you might find you can use compression, I'm wondering here if she is just too loud in places and needs to back off the mic a tad when she is really going for it vocally. I suppose the question is whether the PA sounds bright all the time or that it is just noticeable a few times in the gig. I've recorded gigs from time to time with a portable recorder to identify problems. Good luck if it is a problem with vocals or guitar, I've found in the past that what I see as a purely technical problem is seen as criticism and my 'helpful' advice not wanted I think you're reaching the point though where you are outgrowing your mixer. You want it to do stuff it won't do. I was concerned about mixing live on a tablet with no physical controls until I tried it. Having a tablet on my mic stand is so much better than a substantial desk somewhere close by on a cramped stage. I lucked out when I made the move and went for something actually designed for live work with fabulous software, the RCF M18, sadly now discontinued. I was wondering what I'd buy in your situation. I'm not a fan of the Behringer X series, the interface is just too cluttered for my taste, not very intuitive and I don't expect to have to add a router because the provided one doesn't work well, it does have more flexibility than it's rivals though, it's a really powerful machine. The Zoom has physical faders and is nice and simple but the fx/eq options are limited and you only get a few of the advantages of going digital, it isn't really designed for live bands. I'd probably opt for the A&H CQ series now but they are a step up in price. The Mackie DL16S looks interesting though, I'm just hoping my RCF keeps going though

Hold that thought. I did wonder if it could be an issue with better speakers revealing something that's been there before but has become apparent as the sound has got better. Brighter is a bit subjective the Beta's are a lot more revealing and open sounding but I think quite sweet certainly not shouty. I actually quite like them. The SM58 is a real workhorse but showing it's age and sounds quite muffled compared with more modern mics. I'd use them for backing vocals, they are undemanding of the singer and some times you don't need the weakness of your third vocal exposed, they'll cover a multitude of sins Mic's are a really personal thing and most of them take advantage of peaks in the upper register to enhance voices and help them to cut through a mix. That means a mic suits some people more than another will. In my duo my partner uses a Beta58 and I use a Sennheiser E935, we've tried swapping but neither of us felt happy with the swap. The Sennheiser 935 sounds particularly good for many female vocalists. I play in two bands both female fronted and both singers borrowed my mic and wouldn't return it until they had bought their own. How do you eq her voice? Do you use any echo or delay or other processing? How is her mic technique?

As you know I've been following your journey with interest. Complete respect for your rational, methodical approach too, you've made a lot of progress. I'm a bit surprised at you and John (Chienmort) both finding the RCF's harsh. I'd have expected the 932's with that lovely compression driver and lower crossover point to sound great with a female vocalist. I confess that's based upon specs only I haven't actually auditioned them but I suspect something else is going on. The trouble with the best speakers is that they are revealing and show up any problems elsewhere. if RCF have a 'house' sound then it is that of a studio monitor, revealing rather than easy listening. I chose RCF over the excellent Yamahas for that reason slightly more detail in the vocals rather than Yamahas slightly coloured, smoother sound. I think @Bill Fitzmaurice thoughts about distortion elsewhere in the chain might be woth examining. Was it one instrument or maybe the vocals responsible for the harshness?

I think usually the best way to make the decision is to set yourself a design spec and look for the most convenient solution within your budget. That's pretty much how you've approached the process. It loos like it's going to be a great set up. I've just bought a used RCF 905 sub on the same basis. I was toying with updating my Wharfedale subs which have done me well but are very heavy. I've been vacillating over getting a single RCF8003 or a pair of RCF705's when the 905 came up at a good price and convenient location. I'm attracted by the possibility of using a cardioid sub set up so I'll look for a second 905 at a future date but I can probably run for a couple of years on a single sub. Anyway I think you have every chance of getting a great sound out of this set up and I don't think an upgrade of the speakers is likely any time soon . If it doesn't work out you can sell the FBT and get your money back so nothing lost. Most importantly let us all know how it works out. You might be setting a trend

I think the answer is not. Firstly not all 4x10's are the same and there will be a lot of overlap with some 8ohm units being louder than some 4's, you'd have to try them next to each other to be sure. The increase in power is not going to give you much more sound. Going from 300W to 500W will only give you an extra 2db where 1db is the smallest change noticeable. I think your comment about ear level is a good insight into what is going on. 4x10's are usually very loud for the audience but are notoriously directional, like a torch beam, with your ears a long way from the 'spotlight' everyone else is hearing your sound better than you. If you like the sound of your 2x10 then a second identical one stacked vertically will significantly increase your sound levels and the top speaker will be pointing at your ears, not the back of your legs

Like many of such questions the real answer is that it depends on which speakers you are talking about. In the real world you'll see many amps rated at 300W into 8ohms and 500W into 4ohms. So the power supply in those amps is clearly unable to supply 600W. However that is at full power, at lower volumes (very roughly up to 75% of full power) you will get double the power. Another consideration is that the 4ohm speaker will be carrying more current and the speakers will be running hotter, at high powers the resistance in the coil will rise and the output will fall as a result of thermal compression. The real stumbling block to a yes/no answer though is that the two speakers will have different voice coils and so the speakers won't be identical as a result. It would depend upon how the lower impedance was achieved. I wonder why the OP is asking though, they say "if I had" so is this a purchase they are considering or just a theoretical idea?

I don't buy cars very often and was amazed how that market had changed between purchases (about 10 years). There was no interest from dealers in negotiating. One dealer was more forthcoming "it's the internet". Everything is advertised online and if they quote a higher price than their rivals they simply don't get a bite. More recently they make more money out of the purchase plans than the sale itself. We've had trouble buying a car for cash with a VW main dealer pretty much refusing to sell a second hand car unless we used a plan. I've seen ads for new Audi's saying "this model only available through PCP"! The idea of a garage offering a guarantee has pretty much disappeared too, replaced by a warranty, which is essentially an insurance policy. Most used car places seem to be closing their workshops and farming out after sales to dedicated repair shops paid for under the warranty. If you are lucky the garage will help you with the warranty claim.

I think the general concensus is to be polite and fair. If I make an offer and thre is no counter offer I'd take that to imply that 'I'm not prepared to haggle'. Coming back with a counter offer means we are haggling but you need to offer a bit more. I'd never take it personally You can't really be upset at someone trying to get a good price. I'm not convinced the 'best price' question is rude though, people are often unsure about bargaining and it's a formulation they have heard over and again on the antiques shows. You have to allow for people being clumsy with words sometimes. I do have my pet hates though; no timewasters is one of them, the implication for me is that anyone not paying is doing so out of malice and that somehow their time is so much more important than mine. Another pet hate is people who make silly offers for something they haven't even seen, which happens a lot on some sites but not so much here. Overall though I think people are right, the stuff sold here is pretty specialist and we are all aware of the value of most of the things on sale, anyone who over prices will soon know by getting no response.

It's fine (and BFM's 2x power is good advice) amps and speakers are rated differently so there is no real equivalence. Expressed simply it works like this (there are all sorts of standards and practical issues and the engineers will be wincing at my simplifications) Speakers are rated by how much heat they can build up before failing. An artificial constant signal is fed into them and the power increased until they fail or reach a particular temp, it's nothing to do with music which has loud and quiet bits but it's easy to measure objectively. Amplifiers are measured effectively by the voltage they can swing before distorting, you connect a load to the amp and look at the waveform on an oscilloscope. Once they reach full power you can see the nice sine wave chopped off at the top and that is the amp's rms limit. So the 900 W amp can swing around 85V but those peaks will only hit the speakers for a few thousandths of a second and it won't heat that quickly and cools down in the quiet bits. However that voltage will move the cones a long way and 85V of frequencies below 100Hz will push most speakers beyond it's limits so how you get on will depend upon how much deep bass is in your signal. Fortunately there isn't much deep bass coming out of your pickups.

I think all my drummers have been really fussy about their sound, more so even than guitarists, and they all have had really good ears, or did before they started drumming 😂 They will usually care much more than you so trusting them is good, though you may need to negotiate if they want something that upsets the band mix. I've never had problems by taking what they say seriously. They/you sort it at rehearsals, we have the odd technical rehearsal where we sort out any PA problems. We put the PA up as far away as possible pointing back at the band and switch off any monitors. I've had drummers taking over an hour to be happy but save the settings (mark with tape on analogue mixers) and that's the mix you take to gigs. If they change things at home then just get them to warn you so you can re-mix. Once you have a stereo feed you just mix it as 'drums'. There are dedicated drum mixers out there and you can use the 'brain' from a set of eDrums to deal with triggers.