Date: 3rd Feb 2011
The Space
The Louis Leakey Auditorium is a nice place, purpose built for conferences and small concerts or theatrical events. It has a seating capacity of about 350, inclined from the entrance to the stage. The stage is not too large (about 35 by 15 meters) with really good in house lighting as well as proper acoustic treatment (i.e., the roof and walls) it is one of the more easier venues to do sound in. looks and feels great.
EquipmentOur back line was rather simple, Aaron was placed at the centre of the stage and he used a Yamaha S90 XS as his primary keyboard as well as a Korg MicroKorg Vocoder that was small enough to placed on top of his keyboard. He also had a macaudio monitor on either side of him. Issac used a roland JC-120 amplifire with 2 12” speakers in it, pretty simple and standard. He used his digi-tech guitar FX. Asaph used an old Peavey bass amp (make and model not worth checking up) it had 4 12” cones, one of which was torn, which gave us a problem (I shall address a bit later on). Issac and Asaph shared one macaudio monitor. George used a Yamaha Custom Kit, standard piece kit with 2 crash symbols and one ride. We micd it with a standard Shure drum mic set, including SM 57’s for the snare and hi hat. He also had one MacAudio stage monitor to himself. We also had 2 Shure wireless mics, one for Aaron and the other for the guest performer/singer (in this case Kanji Mbugua & Eric Wainaina) this mic was positioned on Aaron's left hand side with a MacAudio monitor assigned to it.
For our FOH set up we had 2 DnB C-Series top and mid range on either side, as well as a DnB subs on either side. These were set up on both ends of the stage. Our main desk was the 48 channel Yamaha M7CL Digital mixer. And that’s it! Or so we think…
On the desk
The Yamaha digital mixer is very versatile and might seem complex at first. I will walk you through it. It is also important to note that the kind of power we were dealing with (FOH) was way more than needed, but who’s complaining.
Our drums took up channel 1-8 (Kick, snare, hi-ht, tom1-3, overhead L and R), channel 9 was bass, 10 guitar (both DI), 11-12 Yamaha keyboard (LR), 13-14 MicroKorg vocoder (LR), 15 and 16 were the wireless mics. Make sense? Good.
Now the M7CL allows you to have up to 12 independent mixes other than your stereo out, (which was our FOH mix) and a mono out. One the monitors on stage were fed through 4 mixes. I.e., mix 1 for Aarons monitors, mix 2 for the monitor serving the Bas and lead guitarist, mix 3 for drum monitor and mix 4 for the guest vocalist monitor.
Testing …one…two...three…
Learning Points and Notes
Now it was a pretty straight forward set up but there were a few problems to deal with.
1. Main FOH mixer position. The hall provides a sound booth at the back but the space cut out for the engineer to see and hear is too small. So we had to move our mixing position into the hall. With no space in the middle we had to place the mixer on the back right side of the hall. A much better reference point, but the sound there was slightly muddy and bassy as compared to the middle of the hall.
Solution: there was not much we could do to move positions, so a thorough sound check was needed. We would keep referencing our mix by going to the middle of the room and this helped us determine what worked.
2. Bass guitar. The direct out of the bass amp was not too great, we had a real deep and muddy sound even after a heavy low cut on that channel. This would not help for the kind of sound we were trying to achieve.
Solution: believe it or not, since we did not want the extra hustle of mic-ing the guitar amps (which would have been the best solution), I re-wired the di box so that the feed coming to the mixer was directly from the bass guitar.
3. Hum…Buzzz
because the gig was not s massive, the sound company did not feel the need to come with their generator, which meant we would be getting power from the building. The electrician did not phase it correctly and so we were stuck with being on the same line as the house light. This is a major problem usually.
Solution: the di-boxes helped with the line instrument, lifting the ground. But our mics did not escape the buzz! Luckily there was not o much singing or talking, but when there was it drowned the buss. I must say a general low cut on all the mics is essential especially when using subs. It can also heal this problem slightly.
4. Vocoder
one as to be very careful when using this live, because the vocoder mic isn’t anything special. It picks up pops and can feedback all over the place.
Solution: hard eq-ing helped to level the sound as well as compression that the M7CL had and riding the fader. A slight low and hi cuts o your working with a bit of a n ‘n’ shape on the equalization. But subtractive mixing had to be done from time to time.
5. Drums
there were not to many issues here, just need to make sure you get your eq right especially on your kick and toms. This is usually dependant on ones preference. But basically you want the kick not to be too bassy for this kind of music; with some good compression it also gives the bass guitar room on the lower frequencies. The overhead mics need to be placed correctly and a hard low cut placed on both (a well as hard pan LR) everything except the kick was sent to a slight hall reverb that the MC& provides as well. This gave the drums a really tight almost produced sound with a punch kick right under them.
Once the monitor and FOH mixes mixes were complete it was time to tone down. Now most of the sound was absorbed by the over capacity crowd but remember with a system this powerful it is easy to go overboard. Its not a hip-hop concert and not really a classical one either, so finding a comfortable level is important. Referencing the sound from different areas of the hall (from right in the front row till the back near the exit) will help you get a better idea of what’s happening as the band plays during sound check.
Finally
Now it was a pretty straight forward set up but there were a few problems to deal with.
1. Main FOH mixer position. The hall provides a sound booth at the back but the space cut out for the engineer to see and hear is too small. So we had to move our mixing position into the hall. With no space in the middle we had to place the mixer on the back right side of the hall. A much better reference point, but the sound there was slightly muddy and bassy as compared to the middle of the hall.
Solution: there was not much we could do to move positions, so a thorough sound check was needed. We would keep referencing our mix by going to the middle of the room and this helped us determine what worked.
2. Bass guitar. The direct out of the bass amp was not too great, we had a real deep and muddy sound even after a heavy low cut on that channel. This would not help for the kind of sound we were trying to achieve.
Solution: believe it or not, since we did not want the extra hustle of mic-ing the guitar amps (which would have been the best solution), I re-wired the di box so that the feed coming to the mixer was directly from the bass guitar.
3. Hum…Buzzz
because the gig was not s massive, the sound company did not feel the need to come with their generator, which meant we would be getting power from the building. The electrician did not phase it correctly and so we were stuck with being on the same line as the house light. This is a major problem usually.
Solution: the di-boxes helped with the line instrument, lifting the ground. But our mics did not escape the buzz! Luckily there was not o much singing or talking, but when there was it drowned the buss. I must say a general low cut on all the mics is essential especially when using subs. It can also heal this problem slightly.
4. Vocoder
one as to be very careful when using this live, because the vocoder mic isn’t anything special. It picks up pops and can feedback all over the place.
Solution: hard eq-ing helped to level the sound as well as compression that the M7CL had and riding the fader. A slight low and hi cuts o your working with a bit of a n ‘n’ shape on the equalization. But subtractive mixing had to be done from time to time.
5. Drums
there were not to many issues here, just need to make sure you get your eq right especially on your kick and toms. This is usually dependant on ones preference. But basically you want the kick not to be too bassy for this kind of music; with some good compression it also gives the bass guitar room on the lower frequencies. The overhead mics need to be placed correctly and a hard low cut placed on both (a well as hard pan LR) everything except the kick was sent to a slight hall reverb that the MC& provides as well. This gave the drums a really tight almost produced sound with a punch kick right under them.
Once the monitor and FOH mixes mixes were complete it was time to tone down. Now most of the sound was absorbed by the over capacity crowd but remember with a system this powerful it is easy to go overboard. Its not a hip-hop concert and not really a classical one either, so finding a comfortable level is important. Referencing the sound from different areas of the hall (from right in the front row till the back near the exit) will help you get a better idea of what’s happening as the band plays during sound check.
Finally
The M7CL also allowed me to apply a 24 band eq on the main mix. Now this is a really great tool but unfortunately does more harm than good to an overall mix if its tweaked even fractionally wrong.
Everything from 25 Hz-190 Hz needed to be dropped to get rid of the low rumble that would be unwanted in this kind of setting (especially with really powerful subs). Everything else pretty much remained flat except for a slight nudge at the 2k-6k regions for clarity in the mids. Thereafter any ‘tingy’ sounds on the highs that could be a bit irritating was brought down on the eq graph of individual instruments (this can be caused especially by the drum hi-hat and overhead mic) as well as the guitar sometimes (depending on what effects he was using) so a high shelve on that channel was useful, would play around with it from time to time. But we pretty much achieved that warm George Benson sound with the guitars.
Last note: People have a habit of either mixing out the keyboard entirely by making it to light and tone-y, or making it too muddy and annoying. So finding a good balance is helpful especially when it’s the main ingredient of the sound you are trying to achieve.
*exact eq settings etc will always depend on where you are and the dynamics of the space
Crew
Jaaz Odongo- Monitor and FOH
By Jaaz Odongo for TheMtaaBlog Copyright 2011
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