u/Commercial_Badger_37

Great performance from the band for a start, and credit to the support act too, but for both them and Vulfpeck, the bass guitar was so lost in the mix man. The frequencies were all wrong, like subby with no clarity.

Joe's bass lines were barely audible until Dean Town which I believe was the last song if I remember right.

Slightly disappointed in that regard, I know there's a lot with this band for an engineer to handle in terms of a busy mix, but I feel like Vulfpeck needs a solid, audible bass track to really carry their sound properly, given the intricacies of Joe's playing and it just wasn't cutting through, nor was there much body to the sound.

Do they tour with a sound engineer for all their shows or was this just a quirk of London o2?

Again, nothing on the band who performed incredibly, some of the tightest musicians I've ever seen in a live performance.

Hi all, first time putting a mic on a cajon last night (I'm not much of a sound engineer but I play in a band and enjoy doing sound, so was helping an acoustic act out that was sharing the PA with us).

​

From what I understand, common wisdom is, if you have one mic put it on the soundhole at the back - this is at least what I read and saw before in my research before the show.

​

So I pulled out my RE320 (perhaps overkill for this but it's what I had left in the bag, great mic too) and put it just in the soundhole - it was just not getting a good, detailed image of the instrument at all... very bassy and no clarity. I flipped it round to the front where the percussionist was striking the board and it was infinitely more clear and realistic sounding.

​

How is everyone else micing and mixing them? I could see how some would want to duel mic it and flip the phase on the back, but is it worth the extra effort?

For context, we're a self-contained function band playing different venues every week. We run IEMs and normally have all instruments and vocals going through the PA, with no dedicated FoH engineer.

Recently we've experimented with having some instrument reinforcement on stage again, fed from the desk so we still retain overall level control. What surprised me is that the mix seems subjectively easier to separate and place compared with having every source exclusively reproduced through the main PA.

When everything is coming from the same L/R system, it can sometimes feel as though instruments occupy the same physical space and require much more aggressive EQ to maintain separation. For example, guitars often need to be shaped quite heavily to avoid masking vocal intelligibility, but that can leave them feeling underwhelming, as in midrange heavy yet thin for things like solos or when there's no bass playing for example.

By contrast, when some sources are reproduced from different locations, it feels as though each element occupies its own space more naturally, I seem to achieve a clear overall mix but with less compromise and work.

I'm curious whether there's a recognised psychoacoustic or system-design explanation for this. Is it common for performers or engineers to perceive greater separation when sources are distributed spatially rather than everything being reproduced exclusively by the main PA, particularly in smaller venues?

Has anyone else experienced this? I miss the convenience of a speaker less stage but I'm surprised that it's actually a compromise, especially when there's enough headroom on our L/R to cover what we do.

I'm a gigging guitarist in a 4 piece band. We all have in-ears and iPads to mix our own individual monitor mixes. No click tracks or anything like that, simple 2 guitars, bass, drums, 3 vocals across the front

I'm not sure whether I'm just used to a time where monitoring was not so great - stage wedges and amps on stage etc, but I get a decent IEM mix I'm happy with really quite quickly.

However, we have a dep drummer we sometimes work with, and the man drives me mad - he says when he plays with us he can never seem to get a good mix (whereas he feels he can with other bands). He sits there tweaking and getting worked up between songs, pushing faders on the iPad, getting visually stressed and complains about the gig after afterwards, saying it sounded terrible to him etc.

Im trying to figure out whether it's just that I'm happy to just have something in my ears that resembles some clarity - I can hear what I'm playing, it's in time and that's all good, whereas he's trying to mix it like a record in his ears or something.. i've asked him and he says he never feels like he has time to get a decent mix with us and with other bands he does, but it's not like he plays out of time or particularly poorly (not as good as our regular but that's expected I suppose), so I just can't really sympathise with his perspective to be honest.

For context these other bands he performs with aren't professional bands, more pub groups - our group is a functions band, professional with 60+ bookings a year. We always tell clients it takes us 90 minutes to set up, we all think that's a decent amount of time to set up a PA and get all dialled up in our ears. We may make a few tweaks when people come into the room, I don't really feel like he doesn't have time to dial it in although he doesn't have his own tablet to do it, so he does have to borrow one - despite this he seems to take absolutely ages.

I don't know what it is, I really like the guy, want to support him, but the other guys in the band are getting a bit irritated with the negative energy and comments.

So I suppose my question is, what advice can I give the guy? And do people here tend to dial IEMs as a "that'll do, I've got clarity" kind of thing, or really push for a super polished IEM mix?