Live Gear Setup

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Kill Me Sarah
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Live Gear Setup

Post by Kill Me Sarah »

Our band has a couple gigs this summer. I'm trying to dial in our equipment setup (as you may have noticed in my post about Mainstage). This is a broader question. Our current setup consists of:

A borrowed Behringer Europower PMP2000 with cabinets and monitors
1 guitarist with a Mesa Boogie Recto-verb 25
1 guitarist (me) with a 75W Line6 Spider
A cheap keyboard we run through the...
MacBook Pro with Mainstage
A bass player with some dinky practice amp
A drummer with acoustic kit
A violinist with a bridge pickup
Various microphones

My question: What is the best way to set all this up and what additional gear might we need supposing shows with 100-200 audience members? e.g. should we mic the Mesa and run through mixer or play directly? Same question with my Spider or should I ditch it altogether and run it through Mainstage? Mic the drums or okay without? And since we're using the MBP for keyboards for sure, does it make sense to run anything else through it like the vocals and/or violin? And if so what input device should we use to get them into Mainstage?
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jb
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Re: Live Gear Setup

Post by jb »

Are the cabinets for that Europower powered, or is the Europower driving them?

What's the size of the venues? Number of people there doesn't matter for your sound system.

In general, when dealing with live sound, follow the KISS principle.

I would suggest:

A) Scrape up some dough and rent a practice "performance" room somewhere, and try out your sound stuff.

B) Go direct into the mixer with the bass, violin, and vocals, and the keyboard. Worse case, send the bass into the bass amp and out into the mixer from it, if the bass player needs something near him or her to listen to.

C) Guitarists run their own amps. Don't try to mic them or go direct with them or anything, just set them near the back of the stage on either side of the drummer, and do a soundcheck to make sure the mix from the stage is balanced. If it's a rock band (and with that Mesa/Boogie amp it better be) it'll all blend together. And put some black tape over the label on that Line6, so the Mesa doesn't get embarrassed to be on the same stage with it. Do you have pedals? Bring an extension chord and two power strips.

D) If you need thump, you can mic the kick drum.

E) Violinist should consider an EQ pedal. http://smile.amazon.com/MXR-Kerry-King- ... s=EQ+pedal
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josh
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Re: Live Gear Setup

Post by josh »

Also, are you actually planning on running the sound yourselves? If you're playing rock clubs... they almost definitely have a better PA set up. If not, please take a moment and do a full inventory of what you actually have and list it. Your gear list is really vague (cabinets?). And also list exactly what the venues are (indoors/outdoors, size of space, what kind of equipment they may have on hand). Good luck! Oh, and you may want to post over at Gearslutz too with full details.
Kill Me Sarah
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Location: Tacoma, WA

Re: Live Gear Setup

Post by Kill Me Sarah »

jb wrote:Are the cabinets for that Europower powered, or is the Europower driving them?
What's the size of the venues? Number of people there doesn't matter for your sound system.
Yes, the Europower is driving the cabs. Sorry I can't be more specific about what they are. They are a couple giant boxes that we are borrowing from the same guy that lent us the Behringer :)
Neither are super big deals. One is an outside/backyard party for probably 100 people or so, the other is an anniversary gig at Bell Harbor in Seattle, but not sure which space yet so I don't have specifics. We've played a few things with the PA setup and so I'm less worried about that end of it and was more curious about all of the stuff before the mixer, so thank you for both of your suggestions.
jb wrote: And put some black tape over the label on that Line6, so the Mesa doesn't get embarrassed to be on the same stage with it.
Haha, I know, right?
josh wrote:Also, are you actually planning on running the sound yourselves? If you're playing rock clubs... they almost definitely have a better PA set up.
We have a guy who's coming with us to run the band (a regular band member that will be out of town so unable to rehearse before the actual shows). No rock clubs or anything quite so fancy as that.
"[...] so plodding it actually hurts a little bit" - Smalltown Mike
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