Re: Getting the PA levels right

Can someone please tell me why I decided to play with a band?

No.

"We're only running the vocals through the PA and in most cases we're just trying to set them as high as we can without getting feedback."

We don't have a sound man, nor do most of the places we play. The quote, above, is our drummer's theory about how to begin adjusting the sound. Is it just me, or does that statement ignore certain physical realities, like the audience's tolerance for loudness, the room acoustics, etc?

Well, he's not necessarily crazy, because his theory doesn't necessarily mean you have to play too loud. You do want to adjust the gain on your vocal mikes to the highest possible level without getting clipping. You do want to try to "ring out" the PA of feedback, and you do that by deliberately inducing feedback and then either notching out the frequency that's feeding back, or by just backing off on the over all level until there's no danger of feedback. Or, you adjust the positions of monitors, mikes and PA cabs until the feedback goes away.

But if what he means is that you must always play at the loudest possible volume before feedback occurs, well, of course he's wrong.

95% of all live shows I've been to in the last 10 years have just plain been too goddam loud. Ridiculous. It's just stupid. Watts are cheap these days, and everyone figures they have to use 'em all, I guess. It's just idiotic. Ring out your feedback problems, set your mike gains to minimize noise, encourage good vocal mike technique -- do all that, and then set the overall volume level so it's listenable. Should be simple and obvious, but, by God, 95% of all bands don't get it.

Vocals have to go through the PA, of course. Whether everything else has to, as well, depends on the job. Small to medium rooms, you probably don't need to put everything through the PA. Big rooms or outdoor shows, put everything through the PA. Here's the biggest catch (in my opinion) for the average band: We all have our personal "sound", it's dependent on our instruments, our strings, our techniques, our amps, our cabs, our effects, etc. And then you run it into the PA, and suddenly your sound ain't there anymore. Two main reasons: We monitor ourselves through our own amps and cabs, but that is not a true representation of what's coming through the mains, especially if you're going DI. PA mains almost always have more high-frequency capability than our bass cabs (and guitar cabs, for that matter) and your bass sound will almost always get thinner and clackier, with lots more fret and string noise -- because we don't hear all that through our own cabs. Second reason: It takes really, really good-quality PA speakers to sound good. We spend all our money on our basses amps and cabs, and the other guys in the band do the same thing with their gear -- and then we have to scrimp on PA gear. We end up with Peavey and low-end JBL cabs, and they're not going to give you the sound you imagine in your head, no matter what you do. We're all hearing Meyer, EAW and Turbosound in our heads, but we're buying from the discount pages in the catalogs. You get what you pay for.

All that, plus, there are awful goddam few people that can actually recognize good sound and make a PA sound that way. Most "sound guys" are actually nothing more than "equipment owners."
.

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