Sound Engineering - How tough is it?

A lot of info to take in here!

The band includes a family member, and the rest of the band are keen to get me on board.

I do think it will be a steep learning curve, but I'm being joked as an apprentice. They do have a person doing the sound at the moment who I will shadow for the first few gigs, plus I'll be attending practice sessions whenever they have them.

I'm sorry I can't answer any specifics at the moment, but I'll be making notes from this thread and I'll be getting some replies written up here tomorrow night.

They're going to think I'm some sort of expert with some of the questions you've put forwards. (don't worry, they know I'm far from it!).
 
Naffa said:
Please don't tell me that you mix the volume of each instrument, solely by adjusting the gain pots? :p
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Not at all but I remember before someone showed me what a gain pot was, I was using the faders which were all over the place, if you're faders are at unity then you can adjust you're gain pot accordingly.
 
ginger_pat said:
Not at all but I remember before someone showed me what a gain pot was, I was using the faders which were all over the place, if you're faders are at unity then you can adjust you're gain pot accordingly.
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You're supposed to adjust the gain pots, but the levels are supposed to be set by the faders. ;)
 
ginger_pat said:
Not at all but I remember before someone showed me what a gain pot was, I was using the faders which were all over the place, if you're faders are at unity then you can adjust you're gain pot accordingly.
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You're doing it the wrong way round. You should first set your input level with the gain then you adjust the levels with the faders.

If you keep boosting the gain I'm amazed you can get any volume out front without creating a whiney feedbacky mess. :p
 
Maccy said:
One thing I will add - watch out for rogue guitarists who keep turning their amps up!
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Definitely this!

My son's band had a gig at a pub Saturday - just a quiet little thing with a large number of Hell's Angels, Roadrats and various other clubs having a bit of a biker's bash. Their sound man wasn't the best in the world, but he took his time setting everything up as best he could on his little desk.

After about half an hour he'd got the levels near enough right for the guitar, drum, bass and vocal mics and we were off.

...straight into Ace of Spades and my lad stomps on his hitherto-unnoticed boost pedal :D
 
The best sound engineers I've worked with have always nailed the on-stage sound, making sure every member of the band is happy, before moving to front-of-house. If it sounds awful on stage to the band as they are playing then it's unlikely they're going to be relaxed enough to play to their full potential.

Other than that, most of the comments from everyone else here are fairly bang on. Be responsive to the band :)
 
I did a sound engineering short course (left after 1 month) and was going to be a sound engineer. But ended up going in to IT because my teacher told me it was a quite a difficult industry to get in to.

I was never taught about setting up a live performance but i know for recording a band the drums have a lot of mics (4-7 or more) and the other instruments are just one mic in mono.

I think with live performance for small scale performance, like at pubs, the instruments will have their own amps and the drums will just be raw sound. It is only at larger set up that they have a mixer and run it all through the mixer. But i could be wrong.
 
Make sure you have a roll of masking tape with you as its so handy to have for labelling different parts of the board or even taped across one of the sliders to set a limit or minimum for the slider.
 
quotidian said:
Make sure you have a roll of masking tape with you as its so handy to have for labelling different parts of the board or even taped across one of the sliders to set a limit or minimum for the slider.
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Yup very useful. Newer more expensive mixers these days have digital scribble strips which are probably one of the best things that's come about in more recent times.

http://www.allen-heath.com/UK/News/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsId=560

You can see on the console there the multi-coloured strip. You can assign colours to each channel making it really easy to instantly grab the fader you need - e.g. have all the vocals green, drums blue etc. The iLive for me has been nothing short of a god send, made my life a whole lot easier. :)
 
Please remember this is the first ever taste I've had, so I'll probably get a few terms and things wrong. Also, things may be crudely set up - but it's the way they're used to it and if there's something you think is worth altering I'll mention it.

Just been along to practice and the set up is obviously a bit different to how it'll be on their gig nights.

The mixer is a Spirit M12 - the channels have already been taped/written on so that's fairly straight forward.

Tonight the set up consisted of;

Bass on his own amp, wasn't hooked up to the mixer.
Lead guitar, started on amp but then connected (direct input?) to the mixer.
Had two keyboard channels
Sax
Vox 1
Vox 2

Other things on the mixer that weren't hooked up

Kick and Snare had their own, but there's another spare channel next to these that is fed into from another mixer which has the rest of the drum mic's.
& Trumpet

As for individual mics I'm not sure what they were using.

All I did really this evening was get a feel for the mixer. They were practising with two monitors, one for the drummer and one for the vocals/lead etc.

Talked about things like feedback, I've been to a few gigs before and it tends to come from the lead singer and the nearest monitor, so I guess rather than adjusting her gain, you'd just drop only her on the monitor - so she may not hear herself for a moment, but at least the audience still can.

I'm going along to another couple of practices and will be child minding it at a gig at the beginning of September.
 
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