Tips to Help Deal With a Reverberant Venue
While there’s no doubt that intentionally adding some echo or reverb to your band’s vocals can be a nice effect, the overbearing natural reverb and echo that results from the acoustical properties of certain concert halls, churches, and other venues can be a huge problem for your band’s overall sound and result in an unintelligible mess! If your band is all mic’ed up through the PA, playing and hearing mostly echo instead of instruments can make it really difficult to perform well, let alone stay in time and in tune with one another.
Mid Sweep Controls: Extra Tools for Your Tone
The standard three band equalization system has long been a mainstay of mixers and guitar and bass amplifiers. Even minor adjustments to an amp’s bass, midrange, and treble controls go a long way in shaping your tone. These EQ controls, sometimes called Low, MID, and HI on mixers, are very common, intuitive and effective. However, in a dense band mix, some extra flexibility may be needed to dial in your amps tone or fit each player in their spot for a cleaner mix. Many guitarists can quickly address these issues by engaging an equalizer pedal or toggling to a different pickup. However, using and understanding an amp or mixer with a mid sweep can open new doors of tone shaping without having to add any additional components to your setup.
Balanced Vs Unbalanced: What You Need to Know
If you’ve been around a mixing board, recording interface, guitar amp or a PA system, you’ve probably dealt with balanced and unbalanced inputs or outputs (although you might have not noticed the differences immediately)! This article will discuss the basic differences between the two connection types and what they mean for your pro audio rig.
Blown Speaker? How to Know if You Should Recone or Replace it
A blown speaker is arguably one of the worst things that can happen to your pro audio rig, whether you are a sound pro, bassist, guitarist, or DJ. It may be a freak feedback, clipping amplifiers, or poor AC power, but it can happen to the best of us. Knowing the basic steps of what to do next after blowing a speaker will help you get your rig up and running as soon as possible. Here we are only looking at “abuse” causes of failures and not factory defective speakers. A defective speaker failure is diagnosed by looking at the speaker internally and is caused by misalignment, poor gluing or fragments in the coil gap. These failures are very rare and look much different than a blown speaker.
Passive vs. Active Speakers: A Rundown
One of the biggest choices musicians and pro audio enthusiasts make when purchasing speakers is whether they should spring for passive or active speakers. Just like with any equipment, the right choice comes from a combination of understanding the main components of each and finding the one that best suits your application. This basic guide will cover the main differences between active and passive models and help you choose which one is better for your needs.
How to Choose the Right Microphone
An often overlooked aspect of a band’s live or studio sound is the type of microphones that are being used for the vocals or to mic up the instruments and drums. In fact, the choice of microphone used for these applications is nearly as important as what amps, guitars, or drum kits are being played!
Choosing The Right PA System For Your Event
When planning an event or concert, one of the most difficult things can be choosing the right PA system to use and setting it up. Of course, you can borrow one from a friend, but there still comes the issue of transporting it to the venue, setting it up, and plugging it in. PA rental companies make your life easier, as they often will deliver the sound system to the venue and set it up, at a fee of course. But if you host events frequently, this is not very cost effective.
The Many Benefits of In-Ear Monitors
While a set of high quality monitors is a tried and true solution for hearing your band’s mix onstage, there are numerous reasons why changing it up with a wireless in-ear monitoring system can make your live performance even better.
Sound Your Best and Make Your Audience Happy with Carvin Audio TRC Systems
If you're a musician, DJ, or sound professional who has had to deal with PA systems, you know the drill. They are usually heavy, cumbersome, and take up a lot of space in the van, weighing you down on the way to the gig and especially in a touring situation. And while most music venues will provide a sound system for your performance, most inevitably you will play a gig where the PA has gone MIA. Or maybe there is a sound system, but it is on its last legs and isn’t able to put out the best sound to give your performance justice. With Carvin Audio’s TRC Active Column Array Systems, you get professional, high-fidelity sound in a portable package that gets the job done at any gig. These innovative systems feature full range, dynamic audio that will fill the venue and help your audience enjoy your music on a whole new level.
Speakon vs Quarter Inch- What are the Benefits?
Speaker cables equipped with Neutrik* Speakon connectors provide a multitude of benefits over standard quarter inch speaker cables. While quarter inch connectors work just fine, Speakon connectors take it up a notch with particularly useful features that will earn them a spot in your pro audio setup.
Choosing the Right PA for your Band
If you're a singer, you know the struggle. There you are at band practice, singing your heart out into the mic, but the rest of the band is drowning you out. No one can hear the vocals, and you can't even hear yourself. You can't help but wonder if you just can't sing loud enough. But fret not, chances are you just have to rethink your PA system situation!