Live band/sound engineering

A step by step guide to getting a good sound on stage.

Choose the right system, rule of thumb is if you want full range with enough bass for kick drum, bass guitar, or electronic production including DJing you will need bass bins, usually 2, one per side with poles for your mid/top speakers or one and your mid/tops on standard speaker stands, Bass is more or less mono and spreads around enough that one bass bin is often enough except where a full band is concerned.

Choose a mixing desk with enough channels for your project, here is an average chanel list for a band

1. Kick Drum
2. Snare
3. HH
4. High Tom
5. Low Tom
6. Overhead
7. Bass
8. Electric Guitar
9. Acoustic guitar
10. Keyboard Left
11. Keyboard Right
12. Left Vocal
13. Right Vocal
14. Percussion
15. DJ Left
16. DJ Right

As you can see channels quickly fill up so it's worth considering just using a vocal PA where you just have the vocal going through the desk and musicians fend for themselves, small mixer no bass bins required.

So now set up the Rig, place a least a meter forward of the foremost Vocal mic and about the same to the left and right of the band, get the tops at least to shoulder height so the tweeters are above head height and point at the opposite corners at the back of the room or dance floor if possible, plug in a music source and go round the room and check the coverage, start at the center front, there may be a dead spot so point further in if necessary but remember if you have monitors these will be audible anyway, you are unlikely to get even distribution throughout the room so just do your best to fill the immediate area.

Now place monitors out and connect to the Aux outputs if you have 4 you can supply 4 mixes, considering sharing say 2 or three across the front if you have more speakers than Aux's, vocalists will need the hear each other anyway.

Now to ring out the rig, basically set input gain to 12 o'clock, master volume to 0 db and slowly push up the main vocal fader to 0 db, if it starts ringing suck out the offending frequencys, I use FFT plot app to help determine but often it's just around 1kh, you will need approximately 5db spare gain before feedback starts ringing.

Repeat this for all mics and monitors, this is particularly tricky.
Usually for Vocals you can use the low cut switch below the gain and still roll off some bass to keep most of the vocal out of the bass bins

Next go through the Dum kit, in the order above, trust your mics, place close, less is more with EQing drums and make sure they don't drown out the vocals.

If you want to save channels consider just kick and a central overhead condencer mic.

Bass hopefully can be DI'ed using a DI box with -20 db switch on if it's really loud, EQ will often be flat but remove excess mid that will destroy the vocals.

Same for any keyboards, use stereo and two DI boxes if possible pan hard left right or slightly less.

Guitars are usually loud so only need a bit through the PA to align with the rest of the mix, again don't destroy the vocal.

Now feed the monitors, this is where you will need to discuss with the band, be polite but firm in order to get the levels right, this will later be difficult to communicate so important to get it right up front. Feedback will be the main issue as most vocalists will want it quite loud.

Add a modicum of reverb in a dry room, too much and feedback will be a problem and the mix will sound muddy.

At this point you should be ready to go, minor changes to the faders may be required as each song will differ but trust your ears, and don't forget to use ear plugs once you are happy, your ears will thank you by still working after hundreds of gigs!

I hope this will help, experience is the best teacher.
Please feel free to post questions and comments below and thanks for reading!