Throughout my years of study, I have been afforded many great chances in different areas of live sound. The follow is a few selected examples that I feel outline my abilities and the things I have been doing.
-Gaelic School Christmas Concert -
The goal for this even was to set up and manage some light reinforcement on strings and choirs.My involvement in the event was to perform system setup,engineering during the event, as well as consultation with the film crews that were capturing the event, and providing them with an audio feed from the desk.
The room was a large church hall, with fantastic natural acoustic (I'd estimate a 1s to 1.5s reverb time).The front of house PA we used was a Boss L1 system, we had one of these placed either side of the hall to cover the crowd area. In our initial setup, we had the speakers lined up with the front of the stage, this turned out to be poor choice due to the unforeseen of the movement of players, resulting in the movement of microphones, and therefore feedback. It wasn't a massive problem, but did mean that we couldn't get the reinforcement quite to the peak that we wanted.
As stated above, the reinforcement was to be very light. As a result, we worked with a limited amount of mics. What we did use will be outlined below:
The bulk of the reinforcement was done using 3 AKG C414's, which were placed along the front of the stage area. These were used to reinforce the string section, to give them a little more punch in the room and stand out among the louder brass and percussion sections. This, ultimately, was rather successful, and combined with the lovely natural acoustics of the room resulted in a fantastic sound. Although as stated above, there was a minor issue with feedback, but that didn't impair on the overall sound.
Halfway through the concert, these microphones had to be moved up onto the stage area, to help reinforce the children's choir. This was done because many of the younger children could not get the volume to reach the back of the room, so this minor reinforcement helped them be heard throughout.
Another C414 was used to reinforce the orchestras soloist, this was placed above and pointed down at the soloist, at about a 70deg angle at about 3ft above the player.
The last selection of microphones used were a set of PZM boundary mics, there were placed on the ground along the front of the Clarsach players.
-Maggie Mays-
Maggie Mays is a venue where I do weekly sound shifts. The setup is usually pretty minimal, but that does not mean it's free of problems. For each gig I will set up the system, liaise with the band and then monitor and engineer the event.
My selection of mics is severely limited, with only 4 SM58s at my disposal. This means that if it's not a vocal or able to be DI'd, then it's not going through the system. This is never too much of an issue however, as the acts tend to be fairly small, and if there is a drum kit involved, the venue is small enough that it doesn't need reinforced.
The venue itself is large bar area, and the 'stage' area is in a corner where two heavily windowed walls meet. This presents a massive issue, as the monitors are going to be placed facing the window, and then could potentially mean feedback. To combat this, I place the monitors at a 45deg angle to the window. This cause the sound to most reflect away from the microphones, and minimises the chance for feedback by a large margin.
One way to tackle alot of the issues would be to use a spectrum analyser. There isn't a system available to do this at the venue, but I'm going to submit my report that I did for Sound Reinforcement 2 Outcome 2 to explain the process of doing so
Spectrum Analysis
Firstly we set up the spectrum analyser by connecting the matched microphone to the analyser. After this we tested the system by playing pink noise through the system, and monitoring the response from the microphone, which was placed throughout various places in the room. After noting the response from all the different marked points throughout the room on graph paper, a line of averages was drawn. This line was used to help counter any peaks and troughs in the frequency response by using the graphic EQ, cutting if the Freq was too high, and boosting if were too low.
The purpose of this was to try and counter the effects that the room and system itself has on the frequency content of the signal being put through it, in order for a more accurate final outcome.