A Matter of Sound: Live Sound Production Blog

I have been manipulating and fine tuning the sound and general production aspects of live sound events for many years, especially in a House of Worship context. Many live sound techs learn on the fly and miss out on some critical aspects, techniques and factors that impact sound production. Here is what I've learned... and some sweet tech too.

[amattrofsound-blog]

This is the main part of my current set up. My main board is the Allen&Heath GL2400.

This board has a ton of options and is reasonably flexible. these are my favorite parts: • 7x4 Matrix • Proper dual functionality for FoH and/or Monitor mixing • 100Hz channel high pass filters • Individual phantom power and polarity switching • Electronically balanced XLR outputs with +26dBu drive capability • the two 4-pin XLR lamps that I added.

[amattrofsound-blog]

Basics

Every kids that has listened to a DJ mixing tracks and wishes they could and every House of Worship auditorium expansion or tech team has looked at pictures or specs on the latest and greatest sound tech and drooled.

There are a ton of options out there and its easy to create a justification for why this mixer or that board will improve the quality of the sound or ease with which you can mix great live sound (ok but some things do make the sound quality easier to mix see). But most of the time its not the kit that is the biggest weakness of a sound team, its skipping (or omitting) some basic techniques.

Most of the places I've worked as a sound tech have had pretty basic equipment or they're renting stuff so the kit is a little miss matched and old school. A lot of the time a new youth center or church will have little more than a stereo with some inputs and speakers. Such a small (and generally out-dated) set up does present major challenges including the tendancy to try and compensate for a lack of input quality with an over abundance of volume which as you can imagine will stress the poor quality or under powered speakers causeing additional distortion (and the cycle continues).

There are some pretty simple things that every sound tech should do to start out right.