I was wondering if I could get suggestions on what equipment to carry on the road. I am a Christian pianist. I just would like some decent speakers, a mixer (only need a few channels—one for the track and one for the piano mic), and whatever else goes between the mixer and the speakers—amps etc. Also, if anyone has equipment that they want to sell, please let me know. I am in the Atlanta area.
I was wondering if I could get suggestions on what equipment to carry on the road. I am a Christian pianist. I just would like some decent speakers, a mixer (only need a few channels—one for the track and one for the piano mic), and whatever else goes between the mixer and the speakers—amps etc. Also, if anyone has equipment that they want to sell, please let me know. I am in the Atlanta area.
Click on the DirectOut Audio banner at the right of this page, or just go here: http://www.doaudio.com/index4.php , and Loretta will take very good care of you, getting you the right equipment for your needs at a very good price.
Purchase Mackie 450’s (2) plus a Mackie DFX12 board (6 Inputs) plus a Mackie sub #1501 if you want a lot of depth. We purchased all like new from Guitar Center on line. Check out their used equipment. We purchased all of this for $1600. Skip the sub and you’ll save $700. Add a nice Sennheiser mic and stand for yourself plus a mic for the piano. Best to direct box to the board. Been using this system for a year now…great sound and monitors not needed. By the way…no feedback with this system.
You’d be surprised at how much you can do with a small non-powered board, a good entry mics (like Shure SM-58), and sub-mix into the churches PA. Lots of pretty big soloists do this. It saves a ton of money and space. Assuming you have both, the Mackie recommendations are great.
In the past we have hosted Walt Mills, Candy Hemphill-Christmas, Karen Wheaton, Reba Rambo, Phil Driscol, John Starnes, and several other soloists and not one has ever brought a PA.
In Sound Equipment the sky is the limit. You can spend $1,000 or $100,000 it all depends on what you wish to accomplish and how large a venue you wish to cover. The Mackie systems mentioned above are very good for the $$ spent. EAW has some good speaker cabinets, but are a bit expensive. QSC makes a great little cabinet too, my favorite of this genre of gear. I build custom sound equipment for touring groups too, but it too is expensive. Go to a reputable company and try out various brands to see which one suits your tastes. I have a CD of the Stamps with JD singing “Let Us Break Bread Together” and I use that to audition these type of systems. It is by far the best CD I have ever found to do this. Not because it sounds so terriffic, but because JD had this amazing voice that had both extreme lows and extreme high end, all at the same time.
You’d be surprised at how much you can do with a small non-powered board, a good entry mics (like Shure SM-58), and sub-mix into the churches PA. Lots of pretty big soloists do this. It saves a ton of money and space. Assuming you have both, the Mackie recommendations are great.
In the past we have hosted Walt Mills, Candy Hemphill-Christmas, Karen Wheaton, Reba Rambo, Phil Driscol, John Starnes, and several other soloists and not one has ever brought a PA.
So, is that basically what these soloists used - a small nonpowered board and mic? What did you guys do for the different monitor settings for each artist? What did they play their trax on? There are probably other issues too that I’m not thinking of, but I would be interested in knowing what equipment you would need as a soloist to patch into a church’s system.
If you you wanted to be “complete” to be able to patch into the church sound system, all you would need is a non-powered board, mic, whatever track “machine” you use and a couple of cables that match whatever outs you have on your board. You need two “sends” or outs (most have a main and a monitor send at the least). You send one out to the main and one to the monitors on the church sound system, typically through mic channels so you’d need to make sure that your cables are matched to be able to plug into mic lines or have the proper adapters or transformers.
The simpler version is to just carry in your tracks on CD and hand them to the sound man and say “here you go”.
I might not be the smartest person in the business, but I never found the Mackie boards too user friendly. They have great features and you can really sound good on one if you have masters in engineering. Yamaha and Peavey are both really user friendly. Years ago (I am not going to say how many because you would all say I am old) we used to use a non powered yamaha 1202 board with two peavey power amps and a BBE soud maximizer. That was pretty easy to use… but got way too heavy after a few years. Still have all that stuff, looked at it the other day and just smiled thinking about how heavy it all is. We then went back to a powered 8 ch peavey board and have never looked back. I am using 15in community speakers, would love to get the new 10in peavey’s. they have great sound for a nice light speaker. just my opinion tho… yancey http://www.yanceybrown.org
oh ya… one more thing… mics are very important. if you can afford them,,,, sure BETA 58’s are still one of the best mics going.. I just did a new recording a month ago and they had the best sound of several mics that were tried.
how i long for the “good old days” a nice solid bogan amp, with two mics, and a piano mic, and a couple of Altic box speakers you could drop from six feet and pick them up and remount them plugem’ in and have a good concert…where have those days gone? Wink Wink
