Live Sound - UH Staff Party Part 1 - Preperation

Live Sound
UH Staff Party Part 1 - Preperation

My responsibilities have increased over my time as venue technician at The Forum. In terms of live sound, our club nights and guest PA's usually consist of the same technical specification - a stereo DJ mix and up to 4 wireless microphones. This changed a little this year however, as we made a contract with a church based in St Albans to host their Sunday mass at our venue with full worship band. This has proved to be more involved on the sound desk, which is an Allen and Heath QU-32. For the worship band, I now provide the musicians with separate monitor mixes and, although we run from a pre-mixed band mix preset, I make slight changes to the mix depending on songs, instrumentation etc. While this has been a great opportunity to learn and develop my live sound proficiency, I felt I lacked experience in mixing a band from scratch.

I was delighted to be given the responsibility of being the sound engineer for The University of Hertfordshire staff party, during which I was presented with the opportunity to setup, sound check and mix 3 acoustic jazz ensembles in a professional context. I felt some pressure in this environment to ensure this a smooth and professional a process as possible for everyone involved, so took it upon myself to research and plan exactly how I was going to complete this.

I was sent over the above technical specification sheet (above), which details the expected instrumentation, channel listing and suggested microphones. Besides vocals and guitars, I've not had experience mic'ing any of the other instruments before. I was told in advance that the melodeon and violin players would be bringing their own clip-on microphones, so I decided to spend my time researching how I was going to mic up the flute and double bass.

I found an article on live acoustic microphone approaches to be very helpful in providing microphone positioning advice with solid reasoning. I also found some very helpful video tutorials detailing microphone choices and explanations. Between these two sources, I decided that I would use an SM58 just above the flute blowhole and an SM58 pointed at the front left of the double bass body.

Bibliography

Pro Sound Web (2015) A Beautiful Sonic Treat - Microphone Approaches for Acoustic Performances [Online] Available 

at: http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/a_beautiful_sonic_treat_microphone_approaches_for_acoustic_performances/studyhall/P1/ [Accessed on 12/12/2015]

Lynda (2012) Audio recording tutorial: Miking an acoustic bass technique 1 [Online] Available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSqbIqk6E_g [Accessed on 12/12/2015]

Klee D. (2013) How to Mic a Flute for Live Performance [Online] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RpOTO2WMwg [Accessed on 12/12/2015]