PA Hire
August 11, 2009
Filed Under Music Production |
It has been a while since my last post. I have just built a Pa system with lights and a truck. I used to have a similar system in the late 80’s and toured extensively with it. I have always been dissapointed with the lack of overall experience some companies have with live sound reinforcement, especially when it comes to guitar bands. There never seems to be enough compressors or foldback sends, nor do many sound companies have compression on foldback. I DO. I have a double 3 way composite FOH speaker system boasting 10,000 watts with single 3 way delay stacks, DBX drive rack processors, 8 sends of foldback, martin-type wedges, P-audio wedges, 650 watt each active sidefills, Rinkus heinz drum fill, Soundcraft 24-8 foldback desk, 32-8-2 Soundtracks topaz FOH desk, 16 channel mic splitter for recording, FOH rack with gates, 2 stereo reverbs, 10 compressors, 1 digital delay and of course lots of mics. I have 2 spare FOH desks including a vintage tascam 24 channel studio desk. The desk sounds better than the topaz. It is 2o years old, has spent all its life in a home studio, hardly used, made in japan with some serious electronics going on inside. Steve Scanlon: Vanessa Amourossi’s sound guy used to have one. He used to hire my pa off me less the 400b soundcraft I had and it sounded so clean. You cannot beat these old desks.The foldback is 6,600 watts with compression and feedback suppression. ART HD graphics and a soundcraft 24-8 send make up the front end. I have a very basic 16 can par56 light show at the moment and will be adding 6x par64 led washes, some dmx scanners and some effect lights next month. The mic case is full of 57’s, 58’s, Sennheiser 609’s, Akg condensors and some rhode overheads (matched pair).The foldback system can be split up to make 3 small vocal pa’s with an 8 can static light show. I have theatre blacks that can cover 12meters of stage and the front foldback line. The DBX processors really make the system hum. I still have a stereo graphic over the main desk output just in case it goes pairshaped. I have been looking around at some new active systems and really couldn’t see a difference sonically for the money. For the extra 10 minutes to unload the truck with another two amp racks, give me passive boxes. For what one wedge costs I can buy two good passive wedges and run them off one side of a QSC. Passive wedges bounce when roadies drop them. The truck is a recoed Isuzu NPR300 3.9 liter diesel with 2 hydrogen fuel cells. I will get 180 more kms out of a tank of diesel on a long trip with the hydrogen cells. $500 for the cells and 1 day to install them. Not bad. Cheaper than a gas conversion. The motor runs quieter and cooler with the hydrogen mix.I sold my protools hd system and opted for a quadcore and LE. It sounds the same and left me with a pile of change. I think that anyone recording at home need not waste money on protools hd unless they have a bottomless pit of money and talent. One can get more out of a mac quadcore with logic studio than protools with a massive pac. You still have to spend about 4 grand more on plugins to make the system work properly to compete with the big guys. It is cheaper to give it to someone to mix who has has already spent the money and has a good analog desk. I don’t care what anyone says. You can’t get a good mix out of the box. My system would be perfect for small to medium dance parties and can be used for outdoor events. The stacks have been rained and hailed on and can withstand any punishment you can dish up. The boxes are built like a tank and sound fantastic. Contact me on 0438566178 for all Pa and mixing enquiries.
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