BRASSERIE GIG WEDNESDAY 1st JUNE

PETER HARKIN AND CO

Myself and Marty Bonner were the engineers for the lunch time gig in the North west regional college brassiere. We arrived at the venue around 11.30am to give ourselves plenty of time to set up the equipment and do a sound check. Our first task was to unpack all the gear and have it ready for the band to arrive, as previously planned the band would require a setup for:

·         2 acoustic guitars.

·         Bass guitar.

·         2 vocals.

·         1 bongo drum.

The gear list required for this setup was:

·         2 extension leads

·         2 multiplugs

·         Soundcraft mixer

·         2 RCF speakers with stands

·         3 DI boxes

·         14 XLR cables (6 of which are spare in case of faulty cables)

·         3 mics, of which were: 1 PG48, 1 Shure SM58, 1 AKG C1000s

·         6 jack leads (3 of which are spare in case of faulty cables)

·         3 mic stands

·         We also had a guitar amp and a bass amp, but these were unneeded as it was an acoustic gig.

We started by unpacking the gear and setting up the speakers, the next stage was to set up the mixer and mic stands and position them so the band had plenty of room. The vocal mics we had available to us were a PG48, a Shure SM58 and an AKG C1000s. We decided to use the SM58 and the PG48 for vocals and the AKG C1000s for the percussion. Being happy with all the equipment positions we then cabled mixer, speakers, mics and DI boxes ready for the band to arrive, below are some pictures:

The channel listing for the instruments were:

1. Left guitar

2. Right guitar

4. Vocal 1

5. Vocal 2

7. Percussion

The reason for channels 3 and 6 being left blank was give space between the channels for mixing as seen in the picture below:

The band was scheduled to arrive at 12.30 but unfortunately didn’t arrive until a 1.15. When they finally arrived we found out that their bass player wouldn’t be coming and also there percussionist plus the brassiere would be closing in 20 minutes. This left us no time to do a thorough sound check; the bass guitar would be swapped for a second acoustic guitar with no pick-up and would need to be mic’d using the PG48. After overcoming these problems we flattened the desk and got the band on the way, changing the channel list to:

1. Guitar left (DI)

2. Guitar right (PG48)

3. Vocal (SM58)

Below is a picture of the band performing;

And below is our stage plan:

The problems we encountered during the performance were the left speaker was not working, we tried changing the XLR cable but their must of been a problem with the speaker or desk. As there was little time to change the speaker we had to carry on with the gig with one speaker. The second problem we encountered was slight feedback through the mics, I overcome this by reducing the bass frequencies on the vocal channel and guitar channels; as bass is omnidirectional I found this helped reduce the amount of feedback. The area I would improve on would be to change the guitar mic (PG48) to the AKG C1000s as I think this would give a better quality to the sound of the guitar. Overall the band performed a couple of nice songs and the gig went well despite a few problems.

Health and Safety

During the stage of setting up the gear we ensured all cables were places neatly to avoid tripping and danger to the band or public. We also ensured that speaker stands were well positioned and safe to everyone in the area.