What percentage of bands pump everything through a PA?

pchorman

pchorman

New member
This question came about from the 50 vs 100 Watt amp thread, to which a few of you said the band is always mic'd through a PA anyway.

Do any bands other than mine provide their own sound these days? I'm in a 5-piece with 2 guitars, and we don't mic our amps. I use a 100W 2-12 and the other usually uses a Fender Twin. The bassist also uses his own amp & cab. We play medium sized pubs in Boston that pack around 300 people. Our 600 W PA (300 main + 300 mon) is typically used for vocals alone.

What do the rest of you do for live sound?
Thanks
 
Ditto...

Our band is the same - guitars live off the stage, but only we're running 50W amps. Sometimes a sound guy will mic our amps, but rarely does he send them to the mains or monitors. Our bass guy plays pretty loud on stage, but often he'll be DI'd as well.

Our own PA is similar to yours, and we'll only use it for vocals, and to fill out the keys (which get horribly lost even with 50W guitar amps).

Having our guitars coming off the stage creates monitoring problems that we continually struggle with. However, the full sound you get when everyone is turned up (especially the drums!) is much different than a quiet stage pumped loud through the mains. Yaa...we sound 'Garage'...
 
It depends on the size of the venue and the crowd and the size/quality of the PA. If you are playing in a small venue and your off stage sound is already plenty loud enough then just running the vox through the PA to keep up with the bands off stage sound is enough.

Fully miked mixes require a big enough room, audience AND PA to work. In reality it is far easier to mix a fully miked band in a big room on a large PA than mix in a small room on a small PA with and band that 's too loud off stage AND won't turn down! ;)

The bigger the the room and the further from the stage, the greater the requirement to mic everything begining with the quietest instruments first and graduating the the loudest last.

Full mixes also require decent bass subs and plenty of amplifier headroom if you want a a big fat solid sound. A vocal rig won't cut it in this situation so don't bother putting anything else through except for vox and acoustic instruments or you'll overload the system.

Remember your 'live mix' is a combination of your off stage AND PA sound. The bigger the venue the more the PA is required to play its part. The smaller the room, the more the off stage sound influences things.

The bottom line is if you can't get the vocals above the off stage level in a small venue... then turn your on stage level down! :)

The same applies to monitors.
 
Only thing we ever amped was the vocals. Everyone else played through their own gear... except the drummer whom we desperatlely fought with the stop drowning us out :p hehehe

- Tanlith -
 
Funny you mention drummers. Even as a kid, starter drumkits were louder than starter guitar amps. My first real amp was a 100W ampeg boat anchor that I had to have to keep up with the drummer, at that point we hadn't even left the garage yet.
In most of the bands I've been in, PA was mostly for vocals and monitoring.



bd
 
nope.....

we play a local VFW and we've miced the bass drum once but nothing else it may help but it takes us long enough just to setup we aint got th time to do all that sound checking ....plug in ,turn up, rock out ........lol
 
I bring a small dressing room/hotel warm-up amp and my bass, along with a "lets rock" bass attitude. :)
 
in my bad i pa my bass, the guitarist uses an amp, the vocals are ran through the pa too, the drummer gets nothing cuase hes loud


we play pretty small joints so we dont need big big rigs or what not

freak
 
I've never played any venue without having everything ran through the PA........stage volume was never meant to be "audience" volume/Mix.....the whole band through a PA is EQ'd and tweaked much like a 2 Track Master of your recordings are.
 
well that's funny cause I never had the whole band mic'd through a PA. Now we've played venues large enough to warrant the drums being mic'd, yet never the guitars.

I guess there are as many opinions and variations on this as there are combinations of instruments that could be fed to the PA.

As long as I'm not alone, and I don't appear to be, I don't feel like I've been doing the wrong thing all this time. I've seen other bands play the same venues that we've played where they brought in all kinds of powered mixing gear requiring a soundman to pay attention and tweak all night. In a few cases I noticed that all this did was give the band members (particularly the lead vocalist) someone to bitch at cause he couldn't hear something perfectly. it's very funny when they blame the soundman for sucking!
 
I used to play in a large coverband, 10 (wo)men in total. Whenever possible we would choose the all-PA option and get decent monitoring up because with such a big band it would be difficult anyway for the ones on the left and the right of the stage to hear eachother through their amps.

We played a gig once in a small cafe, cramped on a post stamp sized stage of like 10 sq ft p.p. using a very basic PA. They posted the drummer totally on the right, me (bass) on the left. (I know, odd setup in the first place) I haven't heard the drummer during the whole gig and eye contact was virtually impossible. Needless to say that I didn't enjoy that gig for one single bit. (the TV mounted on the wall, just over my head, well not just over, I had to keep my head down to avoid injury, didn't help either).

What I just want to say is that in such bands it's hard to rely on the amps on stage, especially to hear eachother. Sending it all through a PA is then highly recommended.
 
we run everything through the pa. Its a pain in the ass to get it set right, without a snake and soundman, but when its right ....its right. guitar amps do not have the same presence when they are not miked. I play kind of loud onstage, so i don't have alot of signal going to the board....but i would not even consider doing a gig unmiked...unless the room is TINY...bedrrom size.
 
My band very rarely goes without micing everything. We've played at places that didn't have a PA big enough to run more than vocals through, so we just turned up and a couple of small rooms that would have made micing drums just stupid. But the vast majority of clubs that we've played have their own PA and sound guy so we just set up our gear and do a sound check. I prefer it that way. After all, monitors at these places can so rarely out-do the drums, the last thing we need is to crank the guitars even louder.
 
Most places I play (other bandmembers too) are so small we don't have a problem just useing our amps for our guitars, we use the PA for the vocals and keyboard and on a few tunes mic an acoustic guitar and except to add reverb on the snare we don't need to mic the rest of the drums.
 
We mic everything (except drums in smaller venues), but use the amps as monitors or sidewash.

Gives a better mix when you mic everything, sounds fuller.
 
with all the positive recommendations to mic everything, I'm tempted to try it, but...

does that always imply a sound man or can you set it and go?

would a 300w main + 300W monitor PA be adequate for a 5-piece band in a small to mid-sized venue, even if we left out the drums? probably not.

Is is really necessary to let the bass guitar steal wattage from the vocals too? I think a bass, being fairly omnidirectional, might be fine with its own amp. this logic probably defies common practice but I haven't tried the combinations.
 
retro 70's sound

how about mic'ing up with about 6 Mr. Microphones through ten crappy A.M. radios that ought to get a good retro sound
 
You don't need a soundguy although it's nice, since it's very tough to set levels onstage. A low budget method to get around not having a snake is to get a couple of two-way radios for the soundcheck, and put your soundguy in the audience with one of 'em. Keep an earpiece from the radio in the bass player's ear, and she can adjust levels on the fly during the show.

300W should be enough for a couple hundred people, and more than plenty for monitors. Teach the [expletive deleted] drummer to play at a reasonable level, mic the snare and kick, and two overheads. Think about your ears--there is no need for excessively loud stage levels. Let the audience go deaf from the PA, save your own hearing.

Mic the guitar amps, run the keys direct, and of course mic the vocals. With 300W I'd definitely avoid running bass through PA. You can crank the bass amp, it doesn't cause any problem with stage levels like guitar amps do.

Set the guitar amps at proper levels to hear onstage, and monitor just the keys and vocals. If you have two monitor mixes, maybe give the key player some guitar in her mon.

Finally--and I can't stress this enough--get the [expletive deleted] keyboard player to set her volume at max for the soundcheck. Otherwise she'll increase her level during the show if she wants more keys in her monitor, unwittingly increasing keys in the PA too (this is because key players are stupid). This is a headache for the soundguy, but a disaster for a band running their own sound. This is why I give the keys their own monitor, and I crank the keys in the key monitor to fool them into thinking they are louder than they are . . . I [expletive deleted] hate keyboards . . .

Guitar and bass don't seem to have this problem, because they always play at 11. This is because they are also stupid.

Pretty much everybody is an idiot once you are onstage . . . don't forget that. Normally intelligent people become extremely dimwitted while onstage, so make your setup as simple as possible, practice the setup like you'd rehearse your set. Know it cold down from mics and cable and monitor placements to typical settings on your mixer, and you won't screw up the sound too bad.
 
Late on this but I've been locked off the thread. I am a fan of running everything through the PA system. It seems to me you get a much tighter sound. Even at practice in years past we used to do this because having sound sources coming from many different directions seemed to lead to a crash of sound waves in the room. Not to mention that without the PA the mix changed big time depending one where you where at in the room.


F.S.
 
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