sonusman
Banned
Here are some pics I took the other day of the mixing position at the club I am working at. There are two pics at another club I work at two just because a Yamaha PM 3000 just looks so cool! (okay, not the best sounding console, but they look cool...
)
Some explainations about each pic:
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Ed at PM3K.jpg
At the other club on the Yamaha PM 3K. Me and the lead soundman were having fun with practicing our "Heavy Metal mixing chops"!
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Paul rocking out at the PM3K.jpg
This is Paul O Brian, lead soundman that the Mount Tabor Pub in Portland at the "3K" demonstrating just how you need to look to mix Heavy Metal. I think I got the face thing down, but Paul completed the look with the secret devil sign! Paul by the way is the, errrrrrrrrrr, second best soundman in Portland
)) If any of you all ever are playing at the Mt. Tabor, the Roseland Theater, or the Crystal Ballroom in Portland and Paul is working, you can be assured that either your monitors or front of house mix will rock! The best quote I ever heard come out of Pauls mouth at a show was a few days ago when I was mixing Black Oak Arkansas and was bitching to him about how loud they were and how impossible it was to mix. Paul looked around and said flatly "It would seem that you are the only one that cares how it sounds".....
Now THAT is a pro soundman attitude!
Notice the cool little signs Paul put on the plexiglass! (can you guess why the plexiglass is there?
) He used to have a sign that read "This is a MIXING BOARD, NOT A COAT CHECK!!!"
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Ed at console.jpg
Okay, here is me at the Paris Theatre (the club I usually work at) at the mixing position. Yup, there are TWO consoles at the FOH. The Mackie is only used for it's preamps and the Direct Out's of the pre's feed to the ADAT's via being half normalled to the patchbay (so I can insert limiters before tape if need be) and the FOH mix is done on the Ghost which gets the ADAT outputs via half normalled patch bays. ADAT's monitor the input to it's output which is what allows me to send a signal to the ADAT from the Mackie without any eq or fader moves so the recordings don't have any of that stuff on them but I can still mix for the house without effecting the recording. A nice way to do things.... If you look closely, you can sort of see my stand alone CDR burner on the shelf above the consoles. I offer to record the bands set from the consoles Master for $20. No band yet has complained about how their CDR sounds at all, even though I am mixing for the room to sound good.
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Good Rack shot.jpg
Here is the FOH rack. I have of course the normal house eq's (the big Ashley above the ADAT's) and the two Sampsons for the monitors (the Sampsons are "black holes" for sound....). After that, of course the two ADAT's complete with BRC. I have 12 channels of compression (3X Composer Pro's, 1 3630, 1 dbx 166, 1 Behringer Multicom) 8 channels of noise gates (1 Behringer Multigate and one DOD quad gate), 4 digital effect processors (1 Lexicon LXP 1, 1 Alesis Quadraverb 2, 1 Quadraverb, and 1 ADA Multi Effects). I could run the Q2 as TWO mono units, and still have a LXP 5 available, but just haven't got around to hooking them up yet. All of the eqs and effect processors are half normalled to patchbays, and of course all the dynamic processors are wired and available for patching via a custom made TRS patchbay I made that is wired open. I can pretty much route anything to anywhere....
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Larry.jpg
This is Larry Paris, the managing owner of the Paris Theatre looking like the young ass punk he is!!!
He is standing in front of the wall that is behind my mix position. That material on the wall is 3" rockwool which by itself absorbs 100% of all frequencies above 250Hz. Just to the left of Larry's rather ugly face (yeah, I am mad at him this week, but that is another story for another post) you can see that the rockwool is sort of set in a little farther. That is because that space used to be a window that looked out into the lobby. It is now just two layers of rockwool. Two layers of 3" rockwool will absorb 100% or all freq's 125Hz and above. In this case, since the area behind this wall is the lobby, those even lower frequecies pass right through the rockwool, bounce around the lobby a bit, and have to go back through the rockwool before I would hear them again. I figure I have 100% absorbtion down below 40Hz because of this..... This makes mixing in the room very nice indeed because I can pretty much hear exactly what is going on in the low end..... Oh, by the way, Larry is 32 years old, not 15 like his dumbass looks in this phote that makes him look like a hoodrat... (I will be mad at him until I clean all the soot out of the consoles that resulted from him allowing a band to fire off pyrotechnics in the club!!! that fucker!!! I told him not to allow it and he still did....that little chode sucking asswipe!!!)
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Mic Closet.jpg
Here is the mic closet that built right to the wall behind me. Those pegs that actually hold the mics are actually 4" drywall screws with shrink tubing on them. Works very well thank you! You can't see the 4 condensors above the other mics, but I swear they are there.... Don't pay no mind to those rather shabby looking SM-58 wanna be mics that graffitti this pic. I only use them for DJ's and what not..... I keep my ADAT tapes and CDR's for burning there on the right and of course CD's on hand to play between bands. Blah blah blah....It IS a cool mic cabinet though and the envy of all the 4 other soundmen that work at clubs within two blocks of the Paris.... (Actually, since I built all this stuff in and installed all the cool gear, they all want to do "fill in" work for me when I need it...but where were THEY before I started working there eh? )
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Mix Position North Wall shot.jpg
Not a very bright photo, but should give you some depth perception of the mix position which is about 14 feet wide and about 5 feet deep. The evil Mackie 32X8 is "featured" in this shot. I would like to "feature" it in the trash can, but the guy that owns the sound system can't find anyone to purchase it from him for $1500. Any takers? Please?!?!?!?!?!?! I was assured an Allen and Heath if we could unload that evil Mackie. Help poor ol' sonusman out and someone buy that damn Mackie!!! Please?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Slackmaster really liked the wavy fader positions I set up for this shot. I like to do that for you computer mixers to remind you of all the nice faders you miss out on with your wannabe DSP mixers.....
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Mix Position South Wall shot.jpg
Here is a shot from the other side of the mix postition. Now a really CLASSY console is featured here.... Ahhhhhh, my Ghost. I would sleep on it if the top wasn't so small You can now see a little better the hanging table I have above the consoles. You might be asking yourself why have a hanging table right there. Well, for one, I can put my CDR burner there and watch the meters when I am recording to it very easily. I also now have my RMB (Remote Meter Bridge) for the ADAT's on there so when I am line checking a band I don't have to look all the way down to the ADAT's from the Mackie to see the meters when setting preamp levels (about 9 feet to look!!!). Also, when I mix recordings, I can set the Event monitors up there and have them at ear level, as well as the fact that since the table is hanging, I don't get bass transference from the speakers having contact with the floor except via a 15' long cable that attaches to the ceiling to hang the table. Let's just say that the monitors now don't vibrate the floors at all..... (Yup, I thought of everything here.....)
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Paris FOH Amp Rack.jpg
Ahhhhhhhhh....our Front of House amp rack!!! 12,000 watts of power!!! Not too bad to fill up a room that is only about 36X36 feet eh?
Yup, ALL Crown power amps here baby!!! The bottom Crown is a Macrotech 5003, which drives all of our subs (8X18" speakers in 4 cabinets). In the bridged mono mode we run it in, it delivers 6,000 watts. When I drive this amp to the clipping point, but kick drum in Techno music will quite literally give you a stomache ache! (don't ask how I know that....) The rest of the amps are of course Power Base models. They are the same exact circuitry as the Macrotech series are, but don't have the same built in protection circuitry the Macro's have. Not a problem because............
Yup, you guess what those three Behringer Composers are doing in there, MULTI-BAND LIMITING!!! The house EQ (Ashley) runs down it's own snake to the Ashley stereo 4 way crossover (in the rack there). The Ashley's crossovers outputs run to the Behringers before going to the amps. I just use the Composers Peak Limiter to assure that I don't clip the input of the amps. The Macrotech on the subs has it's own input limiter which work VERY well, so we didn't need to put one on the subs. I am actually going to pull the Composer off of the 12" speaker band (hi mids) because if you look at the crossover really closely (look at the group of 4 knobs in a row on the far left of it) you can see that I have to cut the shit out of the hi mids on the crossover to balance the system. This is because the JBL 12's are just so damn efficient, and the room still have a bit of a upper midrange reflection problem. So anyway, I run the crossover output on the upper mids so low that there is no chance I can possibly clip the input of their amps, so I could use that Composer at the front of house mix position for inserting on instruments and what not. Oh, I don't have pics of the speaker boxes yet, but the subs are EV 18's, JBL 15's, 12's and 2" compression drivers. The 15's, 12's, and horns are in their own trapeziodal box.
Another by the way thing, each 15", 12", and 2" horn has it's own side of a power amp driving it!!! Talk about maximum efficiency!!!
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Paris Monitor Amp Rack.jpg
Oh boy, our lame ass monitor amp rack. Notice all the Peavey yak in there. All total, we have about 2,600 watts for monitors split between 4 mixes. If they were all Crown amps with Ashley EQ's, that would be MORE than enough. But alas!!! We have Peavey amps and Sampson EQ's. Actually, the center front stage mix is using a side of that Yamaha amp, and that Yamaha amp with it's ONLY 400 watts per side of power actually delivers far more power than the Peavey CS 1000's do with their 500 watts per side. Can you believe that? Next time you are considering the cost vs. wattage deal between Peavey and a reputable amp company, think of this!!! My center mix BY ITSELF is MUCH louder than the two mixes combined that share the CS 1000!!! I still find this incredible, but it is the truth! Anyway, we are running a 3 way drum monitor complete with electronic crossover. I kept blowing drivers when we used passive crossover boxes, because drummers are mostly deaf (blind and mute too, but I won't go there.....). So, I convinced the club owner that we needed to put together a 3 way system for drummers. I NOW get a lot of drummers asking me to turn their monitor down..... I haven't blown even one driver in the two months we convertered to this, where I was blowing a driver every two weeks before. Problem solved and the club will see the savings in about another 3 or 4 months.
Notice that nice looking rack to the right. Yup, that is a normal ol' furnace filter that is in the front of our FOH amp rack!!! The back of the rack has a huge outlet fan. The amps stay very cool and very clean in that rack. Dust = heat build up, which means less performance from the amps. The guy that owns this sound system spent $800 just for that rack!!! But it works like a charm when I am not trying to cut my thumb off with the metal blade fan in the back (please don't ask..... it is recovering fairly well a month later.....).
Well, there you have it. Not a bad little setup for a 299 person venue.
Ed
)Some explainations about each pic:
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Ed at PM3K.jpg
At the other club on the Yamaha PM 3K. Me and the lead soundman were having fun with practicing our "Heavy Metal mixing chops"!
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Paul rocking out at the PM3K.jpg
This is Paul O Brian, lead soundman that the Mount Tabor Pub in Portland at the "3K" demonstrating just how you need to look to mix Heavy Metal. I think I got the face thing down, but Paul completed the look with the secret devil sign! Paul by the way is the, errrrrrrrrrr, second best soundman in Portland
)) If any of you all ever are playing at the Mt. Tabor, the Roseland Theater, or the Crystal Ballroom in Portland and Paul is working, you can be assured that either your monitors or front of house mix will rock! The best quote I ever heard come out of Pauls mouth at a show was a few days ago when I was mixing Black Oak Arkansas and was bitching to him about how loud they were and how impossible it was to mix. Paul looked around and said flatly "It would seem that you are the only one that cares how it sounds"..... Now THAT is a pro soundman attitude!Notice the cool little signs Paul put on the plexiglass! (can you guess why the plexiglass is there?
) He used to have a sign that read "This is a MIXING BOARD, NOT A COAT CHECK!!!" http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Ed at console.jpg
Okay, here is me at the Paris Theatre (the club I usually work at) at the mixing position. Yup, there are TWO consoles at the FOH. The Mackie is only used for it's preamps and the Direct Out's of the pre's feed to the ADAT's via being half normalled to the patchbay (so I can insert limiters before tape if need be) and the FOH mix is done on the Ghost which gets the ADAT outputs via half normalled patch bays. ADAT's monitor the input to it's output which is what allows me to send a signal to the ADAT from the Mackie without any eq or fader moves so the recordings don't have any of that stuff on them but I can still mix for the house without effecting the recording. A nice way to do things....
If you look closely, you can sort of see my stand alone CDR burner on the shelf above the consoles. I offer to record the bands set from the consoles Master for $20. No band yet has complained about how their CDR sounds at all, even though I am mixing for the room to sound good. http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Good Rack shot.jpg
Here is the FOH rack. I have of course the normal house eq's (the big Ashley above the ADAT's) and the two Sampsons for the monitors (the Sampsons are "black holes" for sound....
). After that, of course the two ADAT's complete with BRC. I have 12 channels of compression (3X Composer Pro's, 1 3630, 1 dbx 166, 1 Behringer Multicom) 8 channels of noise gates (1 Behringer Multigate and one DOD quad gate), 4 digital effect processors (1 Lexicon LXP 1, 1 Alesis Quadraverb 2, 1 Quadraverb, and 1 ADA Multi Effects). I could run the Q2 as TWO mono units, and still have a LXP 5 available, but just haven't got around to hooking them up yet. All of the eqs and effect processors are half normalled to patchbays, and of course all the dynamic processors are wired and available for patching via a custom made TRS patchbay I made that is wired open. I can pretty much route anything to anywhere....http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Larry.jpg
This is Larry Paris, the managing owner of the Paris Theatre looking like the young ass punk he is!!!
He is standing in front of the wall that is behind my mix position. That material on the wall is 3" rockwool which by itself absorbs 100% of all frequencies above 250Hz. Just to the left of Larry's rather ugly face (yeah, I am mad at him this week, but that is another story for another post) you can see that the rockwool is sort of set in a little farther. That is because that space used to be a window that looked out into the lobby. It is now just two layers of rockwool. Two layers of 3" rockwool will absorb 100% or all freq's 125Hz and above. In this case, since the area behind this wall is the lobby, those even lower frequecies pass right through the rockwool, bounce around the lobby a bit, and have to go back through the rockwool before I would hear them again. I figure I have 100% absorbtion down below 40Hz because of this..... This makes mixing in the room very nice indeed because I can pretty much hear exactly what is going on in the low end..... Oh, by the way, Larry is 32 years old, not 15 like his dumbass looks in this phote that makes him look like a hoodrat... (I will be mad at him until I clean all the soot out of the consoles that resulted from him allowing a band to fire off pyrotechnics in the club!!! that fucker!!! I told him not to allow it and he still did....that little chode sucking asswipe!!!)http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Mic Closet.jpg
Here is the mic closet that built right to the wall behind me. Those pegs that actually hold the mics are actually 4" drywall screws with shrink tubing on them. Works very well thank you!
You can't see the 4 condensors above the other mics, but I swear they are there.... Don't pay no mind to those rather shabby looking SM-58 wanna be mics that graffitti this pic. I only use them for DJ's and what not..... I keep my ADAT tapes and CDR's for burning there on the right and of course CD's on hand to play between bands. Blah blah blah....It IS a cool mic cabinet though and the envy of all the 4 other soundmen that work at clubs within two blocks of the Paris.... (Actually, since I built all this stuff in and installed all the cool gear, they all want to do "fill in" work for me when I need it...but where were THEY before I started working there eh? )http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Mix Position North Wall shot.jpg
Not a very bright photo, but should give you some depth perception of the mix position which is about 14 feet wide and about 5 feet deep. The evil Mackie 32X8 is "featured" in this shot. I would like to "feature" it in the trash can, but the guy that owns the sound system can't find anyone to purchase it from him for $1500. Any takers? Please?!?!?!?!?!?! I was assured an Allen and Heath if we could unload that evil Mackie. Help poor ol' sonusman out and someone buy that damn Mackie!!! Please?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Slackmaster really liked the wavy fader positions I set up for this shot. I like to do that for you computer mixers to remind you of all the nice faders you miss out on with your wannabe DSP mixers.....
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Mix Position South Wall shot.jpg
Here is a shot from the other side of the mix postition. Now a really CLASSY console is featured here....
Ahhhhhh, my Ghost. I would sleep on it if the top wasn't so small You can now see a little better the hanging table I have above the consoles. You might be asking yourself why have a hanging table right there. Well, for one, I can put my CDR burner there and watch the meters when I am recording to it very easily. I also now have my RMB (Remote Meter Bridge) for the ADAT's on there so when I am line checking a band I don't have to look all the way down to the ADAT's from the Mackie to see the meters when setting preamp levels (about 9 feet to look!!!). Also, when I mix recordings, I can set the Event monitors up there and have them at ear level, as well as the fact that since the table is hanging, I don't get bass transference from the speakers having contact with the floor except via a 15' long cable that attaches to the ceiling to hang the table. Let's just say that the monitors now don't vibrate the floors at all..... (Yup, I thought of everything here.....)http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Paris FOH Amp Rack.jpg
Ahhhhhhhhh....our Front of House amp rack!!! 12,000 watts of power!!! Not too bad to fill up a room that is only about 36X36 feet eh?
Yup, ALL Crown power amps here baby!!! The bottom Crown is a Macrotech 5003, which drives all of our subs (8X18" speakers in 4 cabinets). In the bridged mono mode we run it in, it delivers 6,000 watts. When I drive this amp to the clipping point, but kick drum in Techno music will quite literally give you a stomache ache! (don't ask how I know that....
) The rest of the amps are of course Power Base models. They are the same exact circuitry as the Macrotech series are, but don't have the same built in protection circuitry the Macro's have. Not a problem because............Yup, you guess what those three Behringer Composers are doing in there, MULTI-BAND LIMITING!!! The house EQ (Ashley) runs down it's own snake to the Ashley stereo 4 way crossover (in the rack there). The Ashley's crossovers outputs run to the Behringers before going to the amps. I just use the Composers Peak Limiter to assure that I don't clip the input of the amps. The Macrotech on the subs has it's own input limiter which work VERY well, so we didn't need to put one on the subs. I am actually going to pull the Composer off of the 12" speaker band (hi mids) because if you look at the crossover really closely (look at the group of 4 knobs in a row on the far left of it) you can see that I have to cut the shit out of the hi mids on the crossover to balance the system. This is because the JBL 12's are just so damn efficient, and the room still have a bit of a upper midrange reflection problem. So anyway, I run the crossover output on the upper mids so low that there is no chance I can possibly clip the input of their amps, so I could use that Composer at the front of house mix position for inserting on instruments and what not. Oh, I don't have pics of the speaker boxes yet, but the subs are EV 18's, JBL 15's, 12's and 2" compression drivers. The 15's, 12's, and horns are in their own trapeziodal box.
Another by the way thing, each 15", 12", and 2" horn has it's own side of a power amp driving it!!! Talk about maximum efficiency!!!
http://home.pacifier.com/~echostar/Paris/Paris Monitor Amp Rack.jpg
Oh boy, our lame ass monitor amp rack. Notice all the Peavey yak in there. All total, we have about 2,600 watts for monitors split between 4 mixes. If they were all Crown amps with Ashley EQ's, that would be MORE than enough. But alas!!! We have Peavey amps and Sampson EQ's. Actually, the center front stage mix is using a side of that Yamaha amp, and that Yamaha amp with it's ONLY 400 watts per side of power actually delivers far more power than the Peavey CS 1000's do with their 500 watts per side. Can you believe that? Next time you are considering the cost vs. wattage deal between Peavey and a reputable amp company, think of this!!! My center mix BY ITSELF is MUCH louder than the two mixes combined that share the CS 1000!!! I still find this incredible, but it is the truth! Anyway, we are running a 3 way drum monitor complete with electronic crossover. I kept blowing drivers when we used passive crossover boxes, because drummers are mostly deaf (blind and mute too, but I won't go there.....
). So, I convinced the club owner that we needed to put together a 3 way system for drummers. I NOW get a lot of drummers asking me to turn their monitor down..... I haven't blown even one driver in the two months we convertered to this, where I was blowing a driver every two weeks before. Problem solved and the club will see the savings in about another 3 or 4 months.Notice that nice looking rack to the right. Yup, that is a normal ol' furnace filter that is in the front of our FOH amp rack!!! The back of the rack has a huge outlet fan. The amps stay very cool and very clean in that rack. Dust = heat build up, which means less performance from the amps. The guy that owns this sound system spent $800 just for that rack!!! But it works like a charm when I am not trying to cut my thumb off with the metal blade fan in the back (please don't ask.....
it is recovering fairly well a month later.....).Well, there you have it. Not a bad little setup for a 299 person venue.
Ed
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(Our club is smaller too, I guess, but there are times we get 300 peeps in there too.) 