Phil Starr

+1 and definitely used. My feeling is that pretty quickly you'll want to move to a digital mixer and it will become redundant, buy used and you can get all/most of your money back out. You'll also need a parametric equaliser for your vocal problems, something like this https://www.thomann.de/gb/midas_parametric_equaliser_512_v2.htm which might be more difficult to find used. I'd also in your position have a quick calculation about what a digital mixer would cost versus the used value of your mixer +graphic+channel strip. I know that you are concerned about the complexity and learning curve of a new mixer but you don't have to use all the bells and whistles, you can keep it simple. Most of them present a really simple on-screen mixer that will be simpler than a physical mixer with most of the complexity accessible with two taps of clearly labelled buttons and with logical layouts. For me the exception is the Behringer/Midas that looks more like a DAW but even that won't be beyond you. Honestly the questions you ask and your methodical nature show you are way beyond most of the people in charge of a PA. You can try the control software of most digital mixers before buying too. Have a look at teh A&H CQ ramge and I quite like the Mackie DL16 in terms of ease of use. There's an RCF M18 used for £400 om FB Marketplace too, they are discontinued but that's what I use https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1009372180703532/?ref=search&referral_code=null&referral_story_type=post&tracking=browse_serp%3Aa5ccd843-10af-482d-b114-5e29b98cd676

We all do it; play louder once we are mid song. At gigs with my bands I know who gets louder and who doesn't and guesstimate the levels. It would be hard for the mixer's software to do that. I'm a serial offender myself

The reason I looked the Beta 57 was that back in the day I would use the SM57 rather than the SM58 for similar reasons. It was on my shortlist before I plumped for the Sennheiser E935. The sE V7 also gets a lot of love but again not something I've tried. I was worried that @Pirellithecat was going to buy an expensive mic before addessing the eq issues. An hour or two just with the singer should help him do the best he can with the gear at his disposal and probably do more than spending £00's on a mic.

Ha ha that's what I've been trying and failing to say in thousands of words, summarised in a couple of hundred Sometimes calling in a pro is what you need to do. Funnily enough I even looked at the Beta 57 before I posted yesterday but I haven't actually used it so was reluctant to recommend it. Thanks @VTypeV4

Thanks for all the input. Lots to think about, we are really wanting something to go behind and above the drummer's head so that the band name is visible in publicity shots. Appealing to people beyond the room I suppose. Interesting that most people have gone for a black background behind the images and it's nice to see drummers using carpet from our local weavers (Axminster) The other thing I hadn't factored in was too big a banner, looks like 3m wide might be maximum for the venues we play. Hadn't thought of vertical ones though, I can see the convenience aspect. It's also made me wonder if something dropping down from the PA speakers might keep people a bit further back from the stands and keeping beer glasses off the subs! Plenty to feed back to the band. Thanks everyone, BC comes up trumps again

It's hard to recommend a vocal processor until you know exactly what you are trying to achieve, most of them don't really offer eq as such but just like guitar and bass there are individual pedals that will do just about anything. Just like guitar pedals there are as many opinions as there are pedals There are also multi fx pedals the Boss VE 20 and TC-Helicon Voicelive Play look interesting and the TC cliips onto a mic stand so the singer can operate it with a finger. I've not used one but I did use a VoiceSolo for a while. I found compression problemmatic for a set and forget live set up. It needs to be used really judiciously just as a limiter, if you squash the sound too much and turn up as a result you hit real feedback issues very quickly. As to mics feedback rejection is down to mainly two things pickup pattern and frequency response. All mics have peaks in response and many use that to enhance vocals but any peak is where the feedback will start. Pattern is probably all important. Cardioid is least directional with a heart shaped pickup pattern, then you move to super and hyper-cardioid with increasing directionality. The tighter the patten the better the feedback rejection and the better your mic technique has to be. Something like the Audix OM7 is fabulous at feedback rejection but you can't move left or right without losing the vocals and you pretty much have to eat the mic all night. Rmember that the dead spot for a cardioid is straight down the barrel and the dead spot for a super cardioid is to one side at roughly 135deg. Shure give diagrams for the best place to position your monitors with their mics . The Senny E935 is a cardioid (they do a super cardioid with the same capsule the E945) I've never had problems with feedback from them but I've a reasonably loud singing voice so gain isn't too high. As to the room v's vocals issue there is no reason it couldn't be a little of both but as you've now experienced it in different venues and your sound engineer has identified vocals as an issue I'd be looking at that first. Don't rush into buying a mic though, the choice of mic is very individual with different mics suiting different people. @VTypeV4 might be a good person to ask and he was really helpful in sorting out issues I was having with reverb and delay.

What size did you buy and maybe what size did you later wish you had bought?

😂

@Silvia Bluejay I wondered why this had suddenly appeared over here. Good move it's bound to stimulate debate. @Gasman I love an update, the guitarist sounds grand and comes out of this well. Have you played with him since? For the record I'm in the same camp as the guitarist. I own the PA, life is too short to argue about such things and I'd rather stand my round than discuss who's round it is. It also satisfies my GAS

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