r/livesound

What is everyone doing to find Behringer consoles, stage boxes or record cards? Suppliers will happily take my money but can’t give ANY delivery date. Months, a year? Huh?

Really?

I was at a show yesterday, I don't to say whom or where as I was not working so don't know the full story. This is purely to try to improve my understanding not to embarrass anyone.
I will say it was a 40K+ audience and the system was put in by the top 3 in this country. The cable run desk to stage was maybe 60-80metres not especially long.

The support band were the second on, first band no issues, I was right in front of the desk (old habits die hard) so I could see their engineer was using a Midas M32R. Which I honestly found incredibly surprising for the size of the show.

Almost immediately the band were having issues with their in-ears and basically fighting for their lives on-stage. Band members actively talking over PA for major adjustments, it became apparent that their FOH guy was running their monitors too. Another surprise, I've never seen a show of this size not have a monitor desk.

Whilst this was going on, there was continuous channel dropouts - it would lose the guitar, or the bass. the vocals too...whilst the rest of the mix was audible. The system techs looked over his should and spoke to him, but seemed quite unmoved - I got the impression they knew it wasn't a problem with their system.

At the end of the set he walked off with the desk, the next three acts had their own A&Hs and there was no further problems.

So my question is, is this some kind sync issue that would cause this?
I couldn't work out if this was a preference issue, or budgetary but I felt so awful for all involved, it was humiliating but this definitely was not the show to cut corners with personnel or desks.

Hey guys, I know the real solution is for my drummer to chill tf out, lmao, but is there anything I can do with effects or gear to reduce cymbal bleed on my mic? I sing/scream in a band, and we have another singer who also plays guitar. For my IEM mix, I have a lot of drums coming in, and I wanna hear myself more without so much cymbal lol

I know the drummer's position on stage can help, but I hate how this looks. I know that is a me problem lol, but would cymbal shields, combined with a hyper-cardioid mic, help? I don't care about eliminating it entirely, and I've accepted that it is not realistic, just if there is anything to reduce it, even a little bit, please let me know

I understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so I'm hoping a combination of different approaches would get me the best results.

Hi everyone, we’ve run into a weird issue with the Roland M5000 today, at first, all of a sudden the FX stopped working middle of the warmup show, then the bass disappeared from monitors and subs during the main act.

The strange thing is that this happened without us touching anything on the mixer and the display showed that the console is working perfectly and there is a signal flow on the affected channels/sends/returns, but no sound was coming out.
No mute groups, no hard mute, nothing was enabled, it was running just fine, then was a sudden dropout and the only thing that fixed it was to recall the same showfile.
Could it be anything else than a software issue?
Has it ever happened to you guys using this console?

Many many thanks!

Operating audio for a kids show in a few arenas soon. Just basic playback and 9 headsets. A couple of things I'm curious to hear opinions on...

Most importantly thinking about a workflow when ringing out the PA to maximise head room with the head sets. I've done similar shows before and can get a bit overwhelmed with the amount of options for ways to make EQ cuts.. Eg. to hack on the matrix feeding the LR and FFs, the LR bus feeding the matrix, the headset group feeding the LR bus etc. Or since I'd have a system tech using the drive processing (this is a new one for me and probably wont use this option). Or is it a case of making a few subtle, initial cuts then using this and then basically this is your amount of headroom. No amount of EQ is going to turn the mics into magic wands, and will quickly just be turning things down.

Secondly I was wondering what your opinion on putting omni headsets into foldback speakers would be. Will have a few flown boxes to cover the stage. I've done some light reading in the past and most would say absolutely not, its musical theatre essentially (and I tend to agree). But last show I did like this I had one very pesky cast member who could never get enough (leads eh) so I'd send a little (of course couldn't get much level but I think it was a decent amount of reinforcement) just to keep her happy(ish). Would love to just put a bit of the playback through the foldbacks but I can imagine it would be fairly hard to hear your own and other cast members voices during musical numbers especially when the audience get loud. Was running these mics on a post fade send to the mons so they'd turn on and off as i moved the faders (not ideal I know but seemed to work) if there's a better way I'd love to hear your ideas. Although even if it wasn't feeding back it seemed to (from memory) muddy the sound of the headsets.

Thanks for any opinions/advice hive mind

Any tips or equipment upgrades that have helped you improve mixes with just tracks and vocals?

I’ll look into separating the tracks into different groups and instruments.

I’d prefer to keep the playback card and not get into waves.

We have axient handhelds and good capsules.

Forgot to mention this is on an M32 so I don’t really have access to a dynamic eq.

**SOLVED**

I talked to the venue sound tech he said we are getting hooked up to their p.a. and sound system. The advise here on making a stage plot really helped thanks guys!!!

Hey. Complete beginner here. My brother and me have a very minimal set up and it's just us going to playing along drum tracks I wrote with a midi piano. How would we go about giving a professional stage plot and input list if we have minimal equipment? We are a mostly death metal band. We jam with two half stacks for guitars each have 3 pedals, two powered speakers that we play the drum track through and two vocal mics we also play through the powered speakers. So all in all we have 4 speakers. We have the powered speakers connected to a mixer. We have two microphones connected to that mixer and a computer that plays our drum midi tracks. It sounds really good even though it is just a minimal set up.

We have the amps on the left and right, towards the center we have the two powered speakers that play the drum tracks and vocal mics through a mixer etc. Would we just replicate this on our stage plot? I mean I know most bands would use a P.A. system with all those different powered speakers and the forward facing speakers containing the mix. Would that even be advisable because we are going to be playing at a festival with some top professional metal bands? For example would they have huge speakers to connect us into or would we be using the sound power of our two half stacks to carry the sound to the crowd? Wouldn't that mean we would need longer guitar chords and stand further away from the amps? Don't most bands play with some kind of ear plugs? Would it be possible to play good having never used ear plugs and is there a difference?

So basically if advisable I could just have about 5 inputs: 1.Guitar\2.Guitar\3.powered speaker\4.powered speaker\5.Vocal Microphone\6.Vocal Microphone

https://preview.redd.it/rjzu2ubm90bh1.png?width=2084&format=png&auto=webp&s=925c3ea6cd35fbeb08515efa0574c718c47120e4

I've been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why I can't get any modulation FX to side chain into a vocal channel. I can load up any reverb no problem into the FX1. As soon as I try Flange/Chorus/Phaser, I get nothing. Routing looks correct, meters are moving its receiving signal. There seems to be something inherently different about Modulation FX that I'm missing. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, and I'm a bit of a beginner

I have a quilter bass amplifier (Bass Block 800) and I wanted to see about running its two speaker outputs into two passive PA speakers. Is this a dumb idea?

I have a mixer that I have run into the Mono Aux input of my amp for practice at home, coming out of a bass cab which is where this idea was birthed. I figure a power amp is a power amp and it will work if I scale it up.

I use modelers and I figured this would work for small gigs where PA is not provided since my amp is only about 700watts RMS (1000 peak).

Please don't be afraid to tear me a new one if this is a dumb idea

Asking "for a friend"

Why might you use parallel compression on a lecturn mic?

Opinions, please!

I am trying to connect a QU 24 to a QU 5, and have followed all of the steps I believe are required to do so: I have plugged a shielded Ethernet cable into the sLink and dSnake ports, and have changed the clock source from internal to sLink on the QU 5, however I am getting an “Audio not synchronised” error, and I’m not sure how to fix this.
Is anyone able to help me out?

I have previously had this working, and have tried many different cat6 cables, and different software versions on both consoles (both up to date, and on older versions)
I also factory reset both consoles before trying anything so no old configurations should affect this

This is an update to https://www.reddit.com/r/livesound/s/G09JwmByHU

TLDR: [soundcheck] Babysitter was useless, miking took forever (not our fault), but our mons tech managed to get a decent monitor mix and I just tagged along. [Show time] Rough start, good mix at the end. When the fun started, the show was over.

We got there at 8am. Our soundcheck was scheduled from 10:00 to 10:45.

The babysitter was an old guy who had strong opinions about the Midas HD96, hahaha. He asked me if I had used the desk before. I said, "Yes, but not that much." He replied, "So you know more than me... this shit is trash."

I loaded my show and asked him to patch the matrices. He refused: "You chose this shit, patch it yourself."

Well, I managed to patch it (first time patching).

10:00 - Soundcheck started. Risers in position, the input list they had was the updated one (yaaay, communication worked!), a few microphone changes, and let's start miking...

It took three guys 45 minutes to mic our input list... Luckily our road manager knows everyone in this country, including the stage manager, and managed to get us an extra 30 minutes of soundcheck.

So I gave full control to our monitor engineer to make the most of it. We didn't have the best communication setup. The shout mic between FOH and mons was three meters away from her desk. The old guy said, "The shout mic is for us, not for you... bring your own radios..." Always with a snarky smile...

But okay, we're used to this in this country, hahaha.

Well, we played two songs, I managed to dial in a decent mix, soundcheck ended. Show was at 6pm. Saved the scene, exported it to a USB stick, then went for lunch.

Show time: Man, this mix is shit. Clean up the vocals, more reverb!!! (Thanks to one of you guys who told me to use more reverb than normal!) Compress the bass, more attack on the kick... The musical director was there asking for mix changes (thank God!).

After a few songs it started to sound alright, then suddenly it clicked and the mix was fire. I was finally having fun.

And then the set finished :(

Well, at least the last song was fire!!! hahaha

My younger sister (who’s also a sound tech) was watching the livestream on YouTube and told me the mix translated really well on the broadcast.

Next time I'll know what to expect with a system that big.

Thanks everyone who helped!
You guys rocked and saved me on so many things!

Cheers to this sub!

For those using external plugin hosts in live sound:
If a lead vocal has 5ms of total round trip latency from an external insert, is it actually noticeable at FOH?

At what point does latency on a lead vocal become noticeable or unacceptable in a live mix?

What I specifically want to do is run the alpha labs defeedback on the lead vocalist mic. My gear is usually an Avid S6L already running sonnox dynamic eqand de easer. My shows are for 2k or more people.

It’ll run MainStage from my MacBook Pro M4 Pro through a RME Fireface UC II I’m thinking of getting.

Edit: I appreciate the numerous answers, everyone, though please note as per my original post I ask about FOH specifically.

I've always wondered:

How do the FoH folks for the smaller stages (e.g. BMO, Miller Lite, Generac, etc.) get hired? Friends of the person who did it last year? Do they accept applications? Contractors? Rhino?

What about the other festivals, is it a gig for the season?

The AmFam Amphitheater is likely the band's own crew and gear.