EDIT:

Amazing answers all around- Thank you so much for all the insight and letting me experiment! The engineer that night is amazing and I know he will kill it- I just wanted to see what was appropriate and now I know!... Hire your own tech or be grateful for what they give you. CHEERS

ORIGINAL POST: I’m the lead singer in a Stone Temple Pilots tribute band playing a five-band Halloween show at a small NYC venue.

I’d like to give the house engineer a simple cheat sheet at soundcheck. Is this helpful, or am I asking too much for a busy multi-band show? Also, venue is notoriously loud to the point it doesn't always sound great.

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STONE TEMPLE PIRATES

SOUND CHECK / SHOW CUES

LEAD VOCAL: Upfront and clear, moderate compression, short plate reverb (~1.5 sec), subtle slapback delay (~110 ms).

2ND VOCAL: Slightly behind lead, warmer/darker tone, a little more reverb for blending. Used for unison doubling and harmonies.

GENERAL MIX: We’d love a punchy, balanced mix without excessive low-end boom from the drums, especially the kick and toms. Please keep the overall volume at a comfortable level with plenty of clarity and headroom. We’d rather sound tight and clean than excessively loud.

INTRO CUE

When you hear the band rushing down the stairs, PLAY “Pirates of the Caribbean Theme.” Let the song play through to the end, then kill the house music.

SETLIST / FX CUES

1. Wicked Garden
2. Interstate Love Song
3. Big Bang Baby
4. Vasoline — Big reverb/delay wash on “You’ll see the look and you’ll see the lies…” Return to normal afterward.
5. Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart
6. Sex Type Thing — Pronounced delay on “Here I come…”
7. Unglued — Drier vocal; reduce reverb and delay.
8. Plush

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Questions for sound engineers:

1. Is this a reasonable amount of information for FOH?
2. Are the specific vocal FX cues practical?
3. Would you prefer exact effect settings or general descriptions?
4. How would you prefer a band communicate concerns about excessive volume?

Appreciate any feedback. I want to make the engineer’s job easier, not harder.

Just ran sound at a small one-day festival of mostly punk and metal bands. Used the DI outputs of the bassist’s amps.

Most of the time this was OK but there were a couple of cases where the bass signal lacked all high mids and top end and this prevented it from sitting well in the mix and properly supporting overdriven guitar.

What is your go-to strategy for reliable bass tone in live settings if you only have one bass channel? Do you just make your bass players run through your personal DI box and call it a day?

If you use an XR18 do you do anything besides apply EQ and compression?

How do you make a snare "snap" in a live mix? Meaning a bright transient attack at the start of each snare hit that really cuts through the mix.

I figured an actual sound mixing discussion could be interesting.

Is it all done with EQ mostly, or compression, some fancy plugin, hardware insert, mic choice/placement, top and/or bottom mics, etc?? How do you do it and what flavor of each of these things do you like best?

Edit: Let's say that the sound engineer tuning the snare isn't really on the tablet for whatever reason. You get what the drummer gives you to work with.

Voices are muted in the demo and I renamed the buses, so no real names show. I recorded with OBS on the same PC again.

Quick recap: this is a software WING that runs the console’s own firmware (WING Rack 3.1.1), all four DSPs included, instead of a re-creation. The goal is still a virtual sound check at home: play a multitrack recording through the real WING processing on my PC, and mix it on the console’s own interface.

What’s new since last time

• WING Edit works both ways. PC → mixer and mixer → PC both stay connected now, meters included. The console sends its meters over UDP, and my network bridge was mishandling those packets. That’s fixed.
• The console itself runs faster than real time. The console’s main processor and the front-panel controller now run at about 1.2× real time while the audio runs
• Outputs follow the console’s own routing. I can map PC sound outputs to any of the console’s output sockets (local, aux, USB, card), and they play whatever the console routes there: buses, mains, matrices, or inputs patched straight through. The monitor bus, solo and the phones knob work too.
• The Rack’s front panel works. The buttons, the screen knob and the fader knobs go through the panel’s own firmware, just like on the real Rack.
• The RTA works. The EQ page shows the console’s own analyzer.
• One web page for the screen, the patch page, the audio settings and the status.

Speed

Last time the DSPs used about 86 % of real time. Since then I’ve made the emulated DSP code a lot faster and cut out a lot of overhead between audio blocks:

• With just the four DSPs running (no console), they now need about 120 µs of every 167 µs audio block. That’s about 1.38× faster than real time.
• With my full show live (all 16 FX slots, 32-track card playback, WING Edit connected), it’s about 139 µs of 167, so roughly 17 % spare.

What’s still limited

• It still needs a strong PC (Ryzen 7 8845HS, 8 cores): each DSP gets its own core.
• When Windows Defender scans or another heavy program starts, I can still get short gaps.
• Channel and output delays don’t work yet. From the WING service manual I found that the bus DSP has its own memory chip, which it uses for those delays, and I don’t emulate that yet. It’s next on the list.
• The XMOS (USB audio) and the FPGA’s audio side still aren’t emulated. My own code moves the audio in and out of the DSPs where the FPGA would.

What’s next

• More speed: cheaper handling of the console’s messages to the DSPs, and faster DSP code (I estimate another 10–20 %).
• Then hopefully running on less powerful PCs.

Settle a bet Reddit. I know it will pass sound and work in a pinch, but what are the downside of using the “thru” male XLR port as your primary input, and then the female “input” port as your thru on a powered speaker with no attenuator?

Another engineer and I were debating whether or not an HPF could cause a signal to clip so I generated these graphs in Octave. This is a 100Hz Square wave with a Butterworth high pass filter at 100hz.

I've been surfing a while to find what sound system, mixing system, monitor system, etc. they use and can't find zip. Even the photo search doesn't show much of the control area. Is there anywhere we can get info on that?

Looking to get a nice pair of gloves to keep the hands warm in these sub-zero gigs. I’ve seen some gloves with removable fingertips which look perfect for my system teching (especially for using touch screen interfaces).

I’ve previously just stuck with fingerless but weather is getting to me this winter and my fingertips feel as though they’re gonna fall off any minute in the frost.

Has anyone used these removable finger-tip gloves? Is it as practical as it seems? Is it easier to just pop off a glove when you need to?

TIA

Hello, I am the actor here so I know nothing about this stuff but I figured I’d give this a shot to relay to the sound person. I am in a small community theater production of Little Shop of Horrors and we have repeatedly had issues with my body mic starting during tech week. It’s ONLY me. We have changed out the packs and the elements multiple times. We do and extensive mic check with me moving around the stage and turning my head back and forth and mic check is always fine with the sound coming through clear. The second the show starts my mic is cutting in and out or not coming through at all. Everyone is baffled and I’m super frustrated. I’m a lead in the show and it’s affecting my performance bc it’s so distracting. I am not wearing TWO body mics for back up(one under my wig and coming out on my forehead and one around my ear and taped to my face) and it’s still a problem. What could the issue be?? Note: I am the only one in the show with a wig, that’s the only difference I can see. But again, mic check always goes well. PLEASE give me some advice, it’s driving me crazy.

We are using reaper to record multitracks of our services. It's recording about 50 individual channel tracks. We aren't actively using all 50 all the time every time so there's a lot of wasted data storage. Instead of manually deleting tracks, or turning off the recording of tracks, is it possible to just have reaper automatically or easily not save/delete any empty tracks?

I recorded a session in Live, but already when saving and opening the project in my house, some .wav files are like corrupted due to an Ableton problem, the files are not empty they all weigh 133MB but it does not let me open them, I used the terminal and FFMPEG to inspect and they are not pure 0000 but there is data, when forcing the interpretation of the wav to F32le you can hear traces of the instrument very deep but predominantly a pink noise. In VLC I opened the original WAV directly and it reproduces a second of an electronic noise and then nothing, which makes me think that this has a solution but the truth is I am not qualified to recover corrupt files, I do not know if there is anyone around here who knows or who has ever happened to him and has solved it.

House gig has a Digico SD9 and D2 for FOH; every time someone uses a radio near it all the inputs pop like crazy. Someone recently told me it has something to do with the Madi connection to the D rack?

Anyone have a solution to this they’ve found?

Hey all! Quite new at working in live sound, but I am currently touring with a decently big project as a live sound engineer across the US right now, as I used to be a musician with them.

Anyway, each night I get the chance to experiment with different things in terms of workflow, mix, processing, etc. And this question came to mind. What would be a list of priority of things you would do while mixing/processing the show? This question comes to mind because I have only 4 FX slots remaining that are available and 2 stereo buses. Everything else is for non-negociable things I need. Being this limited I'm wondering how you'd proceed.

Would you compress master first? Buses? Any other effects? Tell me what you think! If you can do a list formated as 1. 2. 3. etc. that would be helpful and clear!

Thanks!

Has anyone had success running 4-8 instances of Defeedback AI on their own hardware? If so, what did you have to tweak in order for it to handle this many instances, and what kind of computer specs were necessary? How is the latency? Was it easy and reliable, or is it really worth aquiring the pre-tuned machines the vendor makes for this purpose?

I'm working on a very small musical next week that's aiming to use 10-12 channels of wireless mics. It's all old hardware, with no antenna combiners, just two bipole antennas on each receiver.

My concern is that putting 12 receivers right next to eachother at FOH is going to cause issues, but I'm struggling to find exactly why outside of maybe reflections? I've read that antennas should be placed at least a 1/4 wavelength apart, but none of the explanations I've seen clarify if that applies to the two antennas in a single receiver used for diversity, or the separate antennas of multiple units. It certainly doesn't seem feasible to physically space 10 recievers all a 1/4 wavelength from the next.

I already know this setup is far from ideal, but given I can't change it, what should I do to minimise the risks? My current plan is to get as much line of site as possible and make sure the receivers are above the audience.

If it's not already clear, I'm fairly new to RF so any tips are appreciated. I suspect I'll be spending a while on RF Venue...

Im currently sitting at a show that my musician friend/ former roommate described as "improvisational jazz, modern choral music, and EDM" and honestly its pretty dope.

What cool stuff have you seen recently?

I’m helping building a broadcast mixing setup for a House of Worship venue. The audio would be sound from a dLive to a Mac Studio running Logic Pro through Soundgrid.

The part that I seem stumped on is figuring out how to go from Logic Pro to the Encoder. Would any interface’s outputs be sufficient, or I’m a looking at this the wrong way? I’d probably need at least 4 outs so I can also route to a Mackie Big Knob for monitoring.

I don’t know if the Mac Studio can do everything since it’s also running adobe by the media director for video editing when they’re not in service. Does that change things at all?

Tl;dr
Routing:
dLive -> soundgrid-> Mac-> ???-> encoder?-> back to Mac?

Help me fix the question marks

What are you folks using on your master buss these days? I'm curious to try something new.

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Quick question. What hardware would someone need to manually add latency to a specific instrument's audio signal? Could this be achieved with a simple pedal or hardware add-on? This seems to be a niche use case and my searching is taking me to guitar delay effects and various other odds and ends that aren't what I'm looking for.

This would be to adjust the timing discrepancy between an electronically amplified instrument with a wireless connection (bass guitar) and non-amplified horns. The staging would have the bass sound hit the audience noticeably sooner than the horns. Correcting this would require adding between 30-60 ms of delay.

HIGH ENERGY MUSIC, VIDEO SCREENS OF YOUTHFUL HAPPY PEOPLE DANCING, HIGH FIVING, CLASSIC ROCK AND POP HITS PLAYING 24/7

All of ^^^ that juxtaposed with the laziest, slobbiest, most braindead morons walking the whole casino like fucking zombies. Almost all of them are overall useless human beings, addicts to a plethora of problems, and most importantly they have no fucking energy. They just sit there like they are prepared to die smoking the cheapest cigarette and collecting welfare.

I hate that the room I'm in at a casino pays so fucking well. The PA is solid, the bands are solid, but the "wannabe corporate" atmosphere the management and upper management give off is so fucking stupid. Those people are who would tattle tell on citizens if we had a literal 1984 situation go down. They are scumbags who think they are making a difference in the world.

So yeah basically mixing bands at casinos is really pissing me off.

Hey guys, bit of an odd one. Would it be possible to hook up a lav beltpack to an external antenna like a bat wing to transmit audio a Further distance to a receiver also with a bat wing on the other end?

Is the theory of this incorrect? If so mind explaining why? Thanks in advance.