Cheers! :-)

Hahhahahaha

so true, I used to play in a band and feedbacks are often our enemy, don't know what they do with those eq stacks

+Randy Powell Thank you for the comment! I am glad this works for you.

Thank you!

+bacontrees 432

+bacontrees My favorite way to "tune" a room by ear is to use a reference CD on an old fashioned CD player. Whatever you like, that you think is well mixed, well engineered and well mastered. Preferably something that matches the style of music that will be played during the gig. Plug a good pair of headphones directly into the CD player. Headphones on / headphones off / tune / rinse / lather /repeat. Get the room to sound as close to what you hear in the headphones as you can. If you run subs, keep those low during the process, and turn them up to taste at the end. We all like a good bit of low end thump in a live performance. Make that a separate part of the process. After you get that basic tone established, then go to war on feedback concerns. In both cases, tune each side of the main EQ the same if you're running stereo. Don't worry about what frequency A is. That's only important when you're recording in a digital environment and virtual instruments need to match up with each other and to acoustic instruments. Fussing over that in a live sound setup is a waste of time. If the exact frequency of A is really a concern, then you're not going to be tuning the room by ear anyway. Maybe certain physical aspects of the room will resonate at harmonics that don't agree with the way an instrument is tuned, say a bass guitar, but those are annoying artifacts that should be tuned out of the room anyway, preferably by eliminating or modifying whatever physical structure is causing it in the first place.

+twsbbl - Cool, there are many methods and this is but one; I have also done the CD reference along with the feedback ID, in both orders, and have always had the same results. When a system is turned up, certain frequencies start feeding before others and those are the ones that get reduced. The I put music in and EQ for tone. Sometimes I reverse the order...same results...sometimes I ring out from the stage and sometimes from the mixer....same results. I like that there are people like you who do it by ear as well. In the end - if it is loud enough, if everyone can hear and understand, and it doesn't feed back, sound people win! Cheers!

+bacontrees Yes, the ear is the final authority. You can tune a room perfectly flat using technology, but it can still sound like crap. Flat isn't pleasing. Flat is useful for developing a mix. It's not useful for making an audience happy. For that, you need ears. Consider that live sound production is a combination of two very complex audio production tasks - Mixing, then mastering. Live. In real time. No option to start over. I'll always trust my ears over a plot, even though the plot may give me a starting point. Agree, it's not so important whether you tune for feedback first or for aesthetics first. Unless you're in a really unusual environment, you'll get very similar results either way. I just prefer to accomplish the tonal reference first, then fight the technical issues. That way I have somewhat of a metric from which I know I"m deviating when I start notching things out.

Thanks for the comment! I have more videos on the channel about it and even more to some...stay tuned! Cheers!

Thank you! Cheers!

Awesome! Thanks for your feedback!

Thank you so much!

Thank you! Cheers!

Thank you very much for the comment! Cheers!

David Collins Funny thing - I use the lead singer position for ringing out both the monitors and the FOH. I start at the mixer, ring out FOH (and monitors if they are within 30 feet or so,; further and I will just use stage position for monitors). I used to set the mic up on stage, turn up the fader, master, then increase gain little by little, running up to the stage with each gain increase. Until I got as loud as possible with no feedback (and clean sounding). I now start from the mixer position and double check on stage. I use the vocal mic (the best I have available) to ring out and tune because vocals are the most important thing in a mix. I then fine tune each channel (if needed), including all vocalists and instruments. It is impossible to tune the system (major tuning, anyway) to a specific vocalist, so I use reference signals - my voice, 3-4 reference songs and maybe even a spoken word audio clip - just to get a great starting point before the show. Then I fine tune as I go. It always works. Cheers!

Thumbs up!

Generally, yes. But there is some 'give and take' room to balance things out. Assuming the speakers are a good match for the amps, then you can back off the amps a bit and the X-over in order to run the console at unity gain. But then, maybe trimming down the gains to allow the amps to be at full volume sometimes works - depending on the set-up.

With a basic mixer, try cutting the mids a bit and use a high-pass filter, and get the singer to sing as close as possible to the mic. During the show, you will have to gain-ride some vocalists who don't use proper mic techniques. You'd have to do some gain-riding anyway as levels will always fluctuate.

Awesome!

Thank you for your comment!

a question by the way, do you always run your set up stereo? can I go the mono route for small venue and set up? thanks!

Actually, I ran that system mono for years, until they got us another EQ. I actually preferred to mix most acts in mono, even with a stereo set up, at that place and others.....if a place has a wider room, I would pan guitars and toms a bit but not too much.

Maybe background vocals would be panned left and right a bit as well.

Are you using the eq's as inserts? Say I have 4 mics and I group them in a bus, can I use my eq as a bus insert so all 4 mics can be "ringed out"?, how are you running your eq's in this video? Inserts or main chain? thanks in advance