Hi there, I've done some live sound in the past, as well as engineered in a recording studio so that's no doubt clouding my judgement on this now that I'm back on the live musician side of things, and I wanted some other opinions from those with more experience than I have.
I'm slowly putting together a set of music to hit the stage again this coming summer and am trying to work out some technical details that I need some opinions on and am hoping some of you can lend a thought.
The genre of the music is Industrial, heavy music with a defined (read: largely repetitive) beat. It is also very heavily sample based, played live on a MIDI keyboard with WAV file samples being pulled from a laptop. There will be a live singer with live backups from me. A 2 piece, at least to start.
So I am wondering, since I'm writing, EQ'ing, Compressing, Leveling, Limiting, Distorting, Effecting.... basically pre-creating the entire tone during the song-writing process and triggering samples that will output at a preset level, does the conventional thought process to the live sound need to match that of a typical 4 piece rock band?
By that, I mean should I be sending the primary drum sounds (Kick, Snare, HiHat) out on their own channels to the board for the soundperson to "mix" them for the room, or the fact that I know already how loud they need to be to be balanced to achieve the desired sound, have already set them at that level and since that level won't have the usual "live drummer" dynamics to it (being fixed output samples), can it be summed into one channel by me and sent to the board as is?
Same would go for my (software based) synth sounds and general noise samples. I know many keyboardists who play live with multiple keyboards, and they usually do their own pre-mix on stage with their own mixer and just send a stereo mix to the FOH. If that's the norm, can't I just do the same and send only 2 channels for my entire rig, just leaving that and the 2 vocals to FOH? Or should I be splitting things up and sending closer to 6-8 separate channels for the primary instrumentation to leave them in control of the FOH?
As a soundperson running FOH at a gig, how pissed off or relieved would you be if presented with this scenario?
Thanks.
