So, my pals are on tour and last night they played the local acoustic nightmare. The house guy's a pal and when he finds out that I'm mixing one of the bands (my guys were #3 on a four-band bill), he says, "hey, I wanna go home -- can you mix the first two bands and you'll get paid the club's $$$ too?" I figured, what the hell; I can use the extra cash and I could play a bit with the the rig and see if I could make it suck somewhat less. Also, it was a punk show and between sets I love to play old-skool discs the kids have never heard before.
I brought a batch of mics and a four-space rack with a dbx 160XT, a Rane PE-15 parametric EQ and an Ensoniq DP/4+ effects box. The house console is a Mackie 24*4. To get some reasonable vocal-sound control, I wired the compressor output into the parametric's input and inserted it on lead vocal. As usual, I split the lead vocal channel for monitor and FOH use.
Band #1 was yr basic four-piece new punk band. They had their stage sound together (and volume was good) so it sounded fine but I was running the console waaaay too hot. The singer had his own Beta57A but had substituted some odd screen so it didn't sound quite right. A big bonus: the drummer's Tama ShitStar drums sounded amazing.
Band #2 was similar 'cept their guitar sounds were louder and thinner and didn't have and meat. Plus, the singer (through one of the club's 58s) was way weak -- even through lots of lights were blinking on the 160. I started looking at the DriveRack and paged through the EQs and I realized that between the processor and the Ashly analog 31-bander, the whole thing was set for Gain Reduction Through Equalization.
Halfway through the 2nd band's set, I said, "FCC it!" and between songs I pulled the channel and master faders down to 'bout -5. Then I hit "Bypass" on the analog EQ. Wow! Like a blanket had been lifted -- tons more gain. The master meters ended up near unity (rather than at the top!) and I wasn't into the processor's limiters.
"But didn't the vocal feed back?" No -- remember I had the parametric inserted on the lead vocal. I gently brought the faders up a bit and that one little bit of feedback in the vocals was notched out in the parametric. I also used the PE-15 to basically make the vocal sound pleasant, and in combat audio situations like this, if the vocal sounds good, the MIX sounds good. I took out a bit of 120 or so in one of the DriveRack's parametrics and that cleaned up a low-end rumble thing.
My pals played in the #3 slot and it sounded as good as it could get for the room. It also helped that a lot of kids came into the room to see 'em.
The headline act had their own dude (who must've had an Audio Technica endorsement), so after wiring the stage I went back to FOH and told him that I'd bypassed the house graphic -- and demonstrated the difference between off and on. He elected to go with the blanket. Hey, whatever.
I retired to the bar and ran into my pal the house guy and we had a pretty good discussion of all of this. He was of course ASTONISHED ("you've gotta be FCCing KIDDING me ...!") that I'd bypass the house EQ in the middle of a set. He's well aware of the myriad problems in this room; the list is about a mile long but suffice it to say the biggest problem is the venue management.
This room is in serious need of D9 EQ. Perhaps C4 EQ would be equally effective.
--a
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Topic: Gain reduction through equalization (Read 2412 times)