Al Krow

That sounds like a really good deal Phil, thanks for the heads up! In terms of rehearsing with yours what other instruments / vox were in the studio set up and were they being separately amplified / monitored? Were you just using one of these or a pair when you rehearsed?

Third Xmas back to back Xmas party over a week - it's been great, but has involved quite a lot of travel: last night's was a two hour trek across town to Twickenham for me, and setting up before party guests arrived with a relatively short 1 hour slot before the DJ came on, following dinner, two hours after setting up. Not unusual for a function gigs though. Normally I might find such a balance between travel, loading and setting up and then doing everything in reverse on the way back, a little disheartening when combined with a relatively short set - I'd much prefer to do two hours playing than one given that playing is where the fun is for me, and I suspect for most of us! However last night Harlequins RFC was a great venue, with a really fun receptive audience and clicked well as a band and seemed to be very well received. We even managed to get Xmas dinner at the end of the night, so the stars were obviously aligned! A little clip of the gig with one of our regular dep singers fronting us.

Thanks. I was actually getting a bit of distortion on my Xvive U4s for the first time on the vocals. Interestingly we had pushed the gain on the fem vox up quite a bit - guess need to bring her down and simply cut the rest, and then raise the master vol.

Some of the online reviews aren't looking too promising re the Nux: complaints about distortion in particular. I guess sometimes you can pay too little for something!

Just spotted these: B-7PSM Wireless Monitoring Bug Transmitter & Receiver System, 5.8GHz - Nux | CPC No idea if they are any good, but I'm a fan of the Nux 5.8 GHz wireless for bass. Attractions: - very compact - 5.8 GHz not 2.4 GHz - good price compared to most wireless IEM set ups I guess slight concern that having 5.8 GHz on both bass and IEM wireless with no channel selection options may give rise to crosstalk/interference between the two units?

Very helpful indeed, thanks Mike!

Yeah there's a creator pack bundle for an extra £100 or so, in which they include a WiFi mic.

Oh I thought you had written that deliberately and very poetically! Btw please don't mention "tax" - return season is fast approaching! 😅

@dave_bass5 - starting to get seriously tempted by the DJI Osmo 3. The ability to set it up and leave to track the singer as they move around seems great! I appreciate you're recording stuff directly from the desk Dave, but I wonder if I could ask a favour - would you mind recording an upcoming gig and strapping the second mic to one of the speaker poles, maybe pointed across stage to the other speaker(?) and see how good the quality of the sound is? I'm thinking that could be a nice compromise for situations where not everything is mic'd up and going through the desk?

I love that phrase "a birth of volume" - brilliant!!

@mike257 et al, I've got the hpf on our A&H desk currently set to kick in as follows: kick drum - 30Hz (eliminate low end crud / subsonic frequencies) bass - 50Hz (to stay clear of the kick drum sonic space) male vox - 80Hz female vox & guitar - 100Hz drums other (single mic) - 100Hz Is that broadly sensible? Would you set differently?

Loved this Andy! Great lyrics - excuse my ignorance is "We're connected" an original track?

That's exactly it, Mike. Phil's recommendation of the D5 was what got me looking at AKG mics initially and, as you say, the D7 seems to be a step up from the D5 with a bit of a price hike to match (but as it was going to be a Xmas pressie 😊) Fwiw I've actually gone for the D7S, as I quite like the ability to switch my mic off for when it's not needed. PS I see Phil's vocal mic thread has just been revived - which is great; it's an excellent thread and well worth checking out!

The AKG D7's seem to be well regarded. I've just ordered one as my Xmas prezzie from the missus, which was based on recommendations from @Phil Starr and others on a separate thread, I think, which he can hopefully point you you in the right direction on!

Interestingly a lot of drummers used to go for SM57s rather than 58s. Do you know what mic your drummer upgraded to?

Thanks Mike, excellent post as ever. Could I ask whereabouts you're based and are you playing bass in a band or mainly focusing on the sound engineering side of things?

Yeah, thanks Dave, this is also a big point my mate has raised about how much the vocal mics are picking up. He's actually thinking about replacing the SM58s with an upgrade to see it might help address this.

Mike - lots of wisdom there, thanks! My mate's band has a silent stage set up with an electronic drum kit and I'm pretty sure that they are all using IEMs, rather than floor monitors, so your stage volume point won't apply in their case.

Getting back to the more mundane topic of compact desks... One of my mates has been struggling with the issue of getting feedback with his PA system: Alto TS310 tops and ELX200P subs, Zoom L12 desk and Shure SM58 mics, which is limiting the amount of FoH volume his set up is able to deliver. He's pretty much done everything recommended and nicely summarised in this excellent note, which I'd recommend to anyone encountering feedback issues: Preventing Microphone Feedback in a Live Sound PA The one thing he's not done on that list, that he and I have picked up is yet another capability on the A&H CQ series, is applying a noise gate to channels. I was thinking that it might make sense to apply a noise gate to all the mic channels (including the drum mics) plus the guitar, given pedal board hum, and maybe the bass too? Is this this something that other folk are doing as standard?

I mean it's just one of the best Xmas songs ever! Slade were huge in my youth and doubly so given they hail from Wolverhampton not too far from my childhood home. Besides how often do we get to play a classic rock song with such a cool walking bass line?!

Two great pieces of kit back into full use? Sounds like a win to me! 😊

Well I've held off making a decision until I had managed to properly road tested the bit of kit in question! but my own "best buy" for 2024 is going to have to be a new digital mixing desk, A&H CQ18T which I had the good fortune to pick up as B stock: Hopefully going to provide a significant upgrade to the band in terms of their gigging experience next year e.g. by allowing everyone to have personalised monitor feed.

We were using a new mixing desk on only its third live outing, and the desk upgrade had so far been great on its first two outings. However we initially came unstuck on Saturday night's gig as were using it for the first time with a keyboard, and found that it was only being fed to one of the FoH speakers via the desk. Turned out that the sole output from the (very budget!) keys used by our singer is a headphone out socket and she had a TRS --> TRS lead. However because it's a headphone out, it's therefore a TRS stereo signal, whereas the desk inputs are TRS balanced mono. Anyway we managed to figure out that splitting the stereo signal into two mono and using two of the desk inputs was the workaround, but it meant for a somewhat more stressful sound check than I had anticipated! I suspect that's going to be a relatively unusual set of circumstances as most keys should have more connectivity than just a headphone out socket? The gig turned out ok in the end, though! All's well that ends well, eh? 😊

Second one went a treat. Third one - we came unstuck as keys were only being fed to one of the FoH speakers via the desk. Turns out that the sole output from the budget keys used by our singer is a headphone out socket and she had a TRS --> TRS lead. However because it's a headphone out, it's therefore a TRS stereo signal, whereas the desk inputs are TRS balanced mono. Anyway we managed to figure out that splitting the stereo signal into two mono and using two of the desk inputs was the workaround, but it meant for a somewhat more stressful sound check than I had anticipated! I suspect that's going to be a relatively unusual set of circumstances as most keys should have more connectivity than just a headphone out socket? The gig turned out ok in the end though! 😊