Re: Building new PA system in stages

coreybenson wrote:
Personally, I agree with Jim. I'll never own more than a practice PA
again. I have access to as big a rig as I could POSSIBLY ever need (as
in, handles 20K audiences EASILY, with 128k in lighting as well), but
club sound gigs are easy to come by. I'll just call the local club
sound company and pay them to hump the gear.

A little story:

When I first hooked with my last band they schlepped four PA cabinets and four monitors to every gig. They wanted to run _everything_ through the PA. It was a lot of *** to set up and sound check. It took a couple of gigs to get them lighten the load.

The battle after that was to get them to stop using the Behringer Feedback Destroyer. My approach is to ring out the system. By that I mean bring up the gain until it starts to feed back, then try to notch out that frequency. Bring it up again and notch out the next one. Do it a third time max. Then bring the gain back down so there's plenty of headroom.

The first problem with the FBD is that you really need to make it squeal for it to find a frequency. Human ears can find it faster at a lower volume.

The second problem is leaving filters open to pick up more frequencies as you play. This is absolute bull***. Say you let the FBD notch out three obvious feedback frequencies. Now play a song for the sound check. Know what happens? The damn thing catches what it thinks is another 9 filters. What it's *really* doing is notching out frequencies that are not feedback at all.

I can't tell you how hard it was to convince them that this was the case. How come with nobody playing we really needed to make it squeal for it to find the frequency, but while we're playing we didn't hear a single squeal? How come when we don't touch a thing and release all of those notches we don't get feedback?

To add insult to injury, as time goes on, it widens and deepens the notches. After a few songs things sound like ***. Release the notches and all of a sudden it sounds good again.

As an experiment I took it home and played guitar and bass directly into it. Just playing scales and chords it started notching out frequencies. The damn thing is just too dumb to be much of much use.

After I won that battle things sounded a _lot_ better than before. Of course, the monitors we're never loud enough for the singer. There's a limit to how loud you can get the monitors. His proximity to the mic and the physical locations of the mics/monitors make a huge difference. The singer would not get close enough to the mic. The guitarist insisted his monitor and mic be placed in a position that did *not* correspond to the dead spot on that mic's polar pattern. I went so far as to put the mic right next to the monitor to show him the dead spot, but he would just say, "Look, I've been in other bands and feedback was never a problem, so just deal with it." Fucker.

Another thing. We had a great rehearsal studio with lots of sound dampening materials on the walls (sorry, no lead sheets). The singer would practice with a monitor mounted on a pole pointed towards his head. I tried to explain that he needed to _learn_ how to hear himself from a floor monitor, but he refused to change how he practiced. Fucker.

So, I went to see them at a gig recently. As soon as I walked in I said to myself, "Damn. They're running the FBD. It sounds like ***!" Sure enough all 12 filters were lit up in both channels (24 filters in all). I talked to the drummer about it (cool guy). He shrugged and said, "Jim, you're preaching to the choir. You know how those guys are. I gave up fighting them on it."

I have a somewhat different battle in my current band. We do originals, so there's almost always at least two bands on the bill and an existing sound system. The guitarist always brings a big old head and 4x12 cabinet, which ends up getting a mic on it anyway. I'm trying to convince to just go with a combo. It will be way louder than he'll ever need to be. All I bring these days is my rack and 2x10 cabinet (Hartke 2.5XL). My 2x15 stays in the garage. I *never* have any problems hearing myself on stage.
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