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i am kiss u now posted:A blurb about the author. I've been doing live sound professionally for about 10 years now. I started off back in 2006 as a lowly stagehand pushing boxes around for large shows and helping my idiot friends with their lovely Behringer mixer and extremely underpowered speakers play in my friend's barn during parties. It's cliche but I happened to be a the right place at the right time worked my way up over about 5-6 years. The moment I knew I had "arrived" in the industry was on a New Years Eve several years ago when I was tasked with being the house systems engineer for Earth, Wind and Fire. Without help from the more experienced audio techs, I was to design, fly, tune and align an arena audio system to be used by the band. I came out there with full confidence, directed my crews and made the audio portion of the event a great success. All the years of hard work were finally starting to pay off. I still have this role doing various audio productions with this company even today. Again, to go with these sort of reoccurring theme, I was in the right place at the right time after a friend of mine, who worked for a large, regional sound company, needed a last minute patch person for a big festival. I jumped again at this and they seemed to be pretty pleased with my work. I'm now working as one of their go-to A2s (monitor engineer) and A1s (FOH) doing 20k+ person festivals on multi-million dollar rigs for some of the biggest artists in the industry. I have not toured with a band (yet, hopefully my next stop) but I know people who have and I'm sure there are people here who do as well. Awesome! I bounced area the idea of starting a live sound thread in here but never actually did it because I procrastinate so much it will eventually kill me. I've been involved in sound since about 2001, starting off as a terrible DJ in local clubs and moving on to helping out at a local recording / rehearsal studio with a small live venue attached. I've been freelance since around 2007. I'm a FOH engineer mainly, but lately I've really enjoyed getting into system tech stuff a lot more. I'm based in London in the UK but work has taken me all over Europe and the world. I'm a huge d&b audiotechnik fanboy, and I think the workflow with d&b gear is what has pushed me more towards system teching. I'd use a Digico mixer on every gig if budget allowed. If anyone has any questions specifically about Digico, d&b or on the other end of the spectrum the Midas M32 / Behringer X32 lines I can probably help. I was on an EW&F gig in the UK recently and they had their own custom PA all running on giant 110v transformers. That was an interesting setup. 
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May 15, 2017 00:42
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 01:17 |
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Octatonic posted:I'd love to hear about the x32 line. I play guitar in a 4 piece electronic outfit, and we've been considering investing in an in-ear monitoring setup. We don't play anything big enough that we'd be getting a dedicated monitor engineer, so the thought is to get a mixer that would fit on our rack, and set up consistent mixes that we all trust. Plus, we figure it means we could probably rehearse in a shoebox. The x32 rack looks like it could run the show for us, covering both monitors and outputs, particularly if it can recieve automation instructions from Ableton. The rack is fun, but I've never looked at the MIDI automation on it. Looking over the docs quickly it looks like you can do most things you'd need to do for a four piece. You can also use X-32 edit, the application that'll let you remote control the X32 line from a mac/pc. I know you can automate that somehow as someone wrote an automixer for it. I've no idea how much of a hack that is though. Final option is to use a tablet to fine tweak things. X32-mix is available for iOs and Android now. I carry a TP-Link WR802N accesss point in my gig bag for throwing in the dog box of random dry hired mixers. It's about the size of an altoids tin.
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May 16, 2017 20:13
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Hedningen posted:My band is looking into getting an IEM setup after having dealt with a series of gigs where the house monitors have been complete poo poo. However, as the resident gear dude and the only one who's played in live bands before, they're looking to me for some advice and I have absolutely no clue what to look for, what we'll need to modify in our setup, and whatever else might be pitfalls for a newbie. How many monitor mixes do you currently have? How many monitor mixes do you want? How many aux sends does your current mixer have (what model is it?) Do you want these IEMs to be RF or are you ok with having wired packs on stage?
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Jul 18, 2017 11:22
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The preamps are different on the M32, but who drives an M/X32 level desk hard enough to notice that? The only reason I can think of for getting the Midas over the Behringer is the warranty.
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May 16, 2018 21:36
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The one thing that really gets my goat about the m32 compact is that the encoders underneath the screen don't line up exactly with the GUI as they do on the X32 and that constant half second hesitation when reaching for them is like tripping over a step over and over again. 
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May 16, 2018 22:41
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 01:17 |
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The only real answer is to go passive. There are probably weather protection solutions out there for active stuff but I doubt they're worth it.
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Mar 6, 2019 21:54
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