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Club Touring: Keeping Your Sanity While Surviving A Different P.A. Every Night

A simple SPL meter app (such as this iPhone version from Studio Six Digital) making a C-weighted measurement of 100 dB pink noise can reveal a lot about any system.

Club Touring: Keeping Your Sanity While Surviving A Different P.A. Every Night

Club touring presents many difficulties, one of which is the possibility that you can’t travel with your own P.A. system. Couple that with the fact that when the venue changes every day, mixing on a different sound system every night becomes a huge challenge. Your mix can sound totally different from show to show, and it’s tough to pinpoint the reasons why. Is it the console? The system processing? The speaker arrays? Here are some tips to help you stay out of the loony bin.

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A stereo pair, such as these Sennheiser MKH 8000 condensers, placed out and in front of the singers, can work equally well for either a duet or larger vocal group.

Instrument and Vocal Microphone Techniques

As the title suggests, this month’s column is all about miking of your instruments, vocalists and/or choir to enhance the overall message delivered to the congregants at your house of worship. I am not concerned with what make or model of microphones you’re using. I do have a list of manufacturers I like and use myself, but this month’s column is not about those companies. I am more interested in where you place your mics and how you use them.

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Illustration by Andy Au

The Emotional Mix

As audio engineers, we work in a business that is driven by passion and emotion. While audio engineers — in a perfect world — should have a zeal for their work, many required operations that are performed are devoid of such animated fervor. Flying a speaker array, setting frequencies for wireless units, running cables, patching a stage and ringing out a speaker system are a few of the things that come to mind that do not require a great or enthusiastic commitment on behalf of the engineer.

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Shakespeare’s The Tempest Gets Masque Sound Support in Las Vegas and Cambridge, MA. Photo: The Smith Center, Geri Kodey

Shakespeare’s The Tempest Gets Masque Sound Support in Las Vegas and Cambridge, MA

CAMBRIDGE, MA – For The Tempest, co-produced by the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), based here, and The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas, sound designer Darron L West and associate sound designer Charles Coes turned to Masque Sound for audio system support. The play premiered under a big top tent in Las Vegas on April 1 and is now playing at the A.R.T’s Loeb Drama Center.

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Bartha Invests in Meyer Sound LYON System. Pictured here, the gear deployed for the Arbonne conference.

Bartha Invests in Meyer Sound LYON System

COLUMBUS, OH — Bartha, based here, recently purchased a Meyer Sound LYON linear sound reinforcement system for its rental inventory. Bartha opted for LYON based on its promise as a powerful tool to optimize audio quality for corporate events in convention centers and arenas as well as indoor and outdoor music concerts.

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North Boulevard Church of Christ in Murfreesboro, TN is using an Allen & Heath GLD-80 mixer at FOH

Tennessee Church Using Allen & Heath Mixers to Meet Live Audio, Broadcast Needs

MURFREESBORO, TN — North Boulevard Church of Christ, based here, uses a high-quality live audio system in its main auditorium. The church also broadcasts its worship services over a local TV station, records them for use in a satellite church and provides simultaneous translation into Spanish and Chinese. To manage all these services, the church has a new sound and video system that includes a pair of Allen & Heath GLD-80 digital mixers.

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