Goshdarnit!

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 4:04 pm

Tonight, RO, it was "a miracle". So a member of the band said.
Said I to him: "only at your end..."

Joint service with our band and a nearby Church's choir. Ended up with 3 guitars, a clarinet, double bass, piano, 20 strong choir and 6 vocalists.
Badly rehearsed, noone expected anything too great but it turned out fine. Hence the miracle.

Naturally, I recorded it. Naturally, using onboard sound. Naturally, things went to pot.
I got drift in the recordings...not just a millisecond every so often, or whatever...no, major drift. Like, 9 minutes every hour. And the other track recordings were trying to compensate for the problem...by dropping samples, to "keep up" with a track which was now inputting almost 10 minutes behind reality. So when I stopped the recording at the end of the service, I found that 3 tracks were full of clicks and pops and the other 2 stopped halfway through the second last hymn.

I wouldn't mind but it sounded fine live and a few people had asked about recordings.

Also, I found out that using a $20 mic to mic both a clarinet and a double bass at the same time is NOT going to work. Ever.
Nor is using 4 randomly arranged vocalist mics to capture a choir sitting 10 feet away.
Oh, and writing audio data to a hard drive which is 8 times as slow as it should be...causes an entire CPU core to be chewed up with "Hardware Interrupts".

Sorry for the rant.

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:54 pm

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Trying to convince a church to buy passable, we're not even talking good, sound equipment is losing proposition most of the time Razz

. I feel your pain. Fortunately (or is that unfortunately?) I'm playing most of the time, so I don't have to get to use 2 sm58's to mic an entire praise team Razz

; I get to try to convince the sound man that guitar distortion is indeed a desirable thing Very Happy

. Keep at it though, competent sound men are a must have.

Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 6:43 am

I am quite fortunate that our church takes the music pretty seriously and has made an attempt at a real sound system (GL3300, EV speakers, 18" subs, about 8,000 watts to run it) and they let me run it at concert volume every sunday!

The only problem is I have to run 8 separate monitor mixes while trying to manage mains at the same time Evil or Very Mad

And, to top it off, the background vocalists basically whisper into the mics from about 3 feet away and wonder why they can't hear themselves in the monitor Rolling Eyes

And, to top that off my boss has the impression that music shouldn't be "overcompressed" so therefore we have absolutely ZERO outboard compression Confused

and to top THAT off, the few old 3630's that I donated so we could at least have some dynamic control kept getting unplugged because the other engineers didn't know how to use them Shocked

and, oh yeah, did I mention that I love my job Very Happy

Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 9:49 am

8 monitor mixes...yikes. I got 2, on-the-fly IEM for old deaf people, recordings and mains. And I thought I had it bad. So long as there's communication though, it's usually easy enough.

You get 2 SM58s...we have (counts) 8 mics. 2 crap AKG's with zero high end, 3 PG58s, 2 AT BrandX's and some old thing that probably came from a bin which I've never used. We also have 5 stands, 2 of which have stupid amounts of electrical tape holding the mic clip on. There's 2 stands been loaned out to a school and we've not picked them up.
Distortion is good. I've found it makes something jump out because of the tone. Usually it's the lead guitar, since the battery goes and the signal clips itself (acoustic with pickups)

Sound is taken seriously enough, just so long as we can get by. Nothing too fancy, just what's needed...eg $20 mics. The board also has *I think* 2 channels dead now. No chance of a replacement for at least 18 months from now.
And I know what you mean about the vocals whispering. I don't mind people going a few inches back from the mic but the preamps are running about 15dB off the max gain. Not much in the way of boost there, and people sing quietly.

We also have a guy who plays tambourine and sings. That's fine, but the tamb drowns out the live drumkit (played with Flix, - they look like spaghetti and are about 30dB quieter).

Oh, and don't you just hate working around music stands? One of these times I'm gonna be plugging a cable into a DI, then stand up and get a prong from a music stand in my eye. Not happened yet, but it's been close.
What does it take to get people not to:
1) Put music stands up while the sound guy is running around.
2) Unplug guitar leads during the service.

I should mention that I also love what I do, just not this weekend.

Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 6:53 pm

Your in the wrong country CM, pop across the pond!

Entertainment drives Americas economy Smile

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 5:55 pm

Unfortunately man, my EQ presets are set to remove 50Hz and not 60Hz. I don't feel I could cope with the work needed to update them to remove 60Hz instead.

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 6:16 pm

What is that...some kinda political slur?

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 6:28 pm

No, it's a (inserious) complaint about the time required to update my EQ presets.

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 7:13 pm

oh...just checking

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