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The Sound behind the Ultimate Gaana Party. When the idea for the Gaana Party finally took form, we had decided that one of the goals for the show should be "studio quality sound from live music." We thought this was achievable because:
Did we achieve the sound we wanted? No, but we were close in many ways. I've been asked to describe our audio setup for the concert and the background behind it (No Shiraz, I am not making this up). :) For 96% of all people this will be too much information, but it's here in case anyone *really* wants to know. :) -Adil Sound Discussion: click here if you want a description assuming an audio background Sound Discussion: click here if you're a normal person :) The venue. The venue was a medium-sized room: a rectangle about 18' x 20' with a 14' ceiling and an irregular opening on the audience end. The walls were bare, and there was no furniture. To alleviate some small amount of pong echo and to lower the room's Rt60, I put up Auralex foam sheets in a few strategic locations. To manage the worst room modes, I ran the PA through a digital graphic equalizer and real-time analyzer. The EQ was set for essentially flat response from 20Hz to about 18kHz using pink noise and a calibration mic at the mid audience position (The self-powered monitors used for the PA system had response up to 40KHz, so I suspect the high end was distorted by the reverberation field). I re-EQ'd the system right before the show once all the equipment was set up. Admittedly, I could have compensated for the additional mode reduction effect of the audience. But, at the time, the equipment was new to me, and I was hesitant to use the real-time analysis function with live program material of an unknown spectral distribution, preferring the pink noise source (of course loud pink noise through the mains is not what you want to hear as an audience during a show). The signal chain: vocals. Singers sang into either one of two sm58's, a beta58 (we used this for Farah for a slightly crispier edge), or a beta57 (borrowed from our tabla player because we ran out of 58's). Two mics were setup as lead mics, and two as backup mics. The lead mics were louder in the mix, had individual compression, and less reverb. The backup mics shared a single stereo compressor, were compressed slightly more than the leads, and were panned more off center. The signal chain for all mics was:
Additionally there was an aux send tap on each vocal chain feeding a Lexicon reverb box (went out in mono; came back in stereo). The RNC compressors worked wonderfully (these easily have the transparency and clarity of $1500 studio boxes), though I should have tweaked them for certain singers and certain songs. Likewise, the vocal channels should have been individually EQ'd for each singer, though this would have been non-trivial because of the way we executed the concert that night with constant switching of mics and lineups, and because the mixing rig was in the stage area behind the mains. Vocal monitoring. We used a third, self-powered Yamaha studio monitor for monitoring. This was simply fed the mono mix from the board. The digital EQ on the mains also contained a feedback destroyer that was enabled the whole show (six very narrow computer-controlled parametric notch filters, whose fc's were tuned round-robin fashion to any steady tone that the computer thought sounded like feedback). This worked fairly well, at least in killing feedback before it became loud and sustained. The PA still suffered from occasional annoying squeals, and I made a mistake in enabling *all* six notch filters which had the effect of shredding a bit of the overall sound, and we lost some clarity: one or two fixed notch filters would have sufficed. The one monitor used for monitoring could have been better placed, and noise gates should have been used throughout on all open mics. I muted whatever we weren't using, but with two or more singers on any song, it still caused problems. I should have explained the difference between cardiod and supercardiod (beta58) pickup patterns to the singers, and perhaps more importantly told them that they need to sing very close to the mics. The signal chain: guitars and tabla. The signal chain: keyboards and drums. The PA. (under construction)
Sound Discussion for Normal People As I mentioned above the goal for the show was "studio quality sound from live music." To that end, we used all the equipment we'd normally use to record and playback a studio recording except condenser mics. (under construction)
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