Fixing Feedback and Stage Sound with Audio Engineer Andy Dolph – GigGab 104

Kevin Tisdall · February 28, 2017 at 10:28 am EST

Lots of good discussion here. I would have replaced the md421 in the kick with nearly any other mic. I’ve had them and a 58 sounds better on kick and there are better cheaper mics for kick (Beta 52? PG52?). If you have $400+ the EV RE20 is about perfect. As discussed, multiple mics can work great with the known complications.

Another possibility especially with digital boards is to apply a gate to the kick. I have two bands with kick drums with no holes. I can make those thump just fine with some gating.

The High Pass Filter / roll off vocals/guitars/high brass below ~130hz is first thing to do. If you run aux-fed-subs you can keep everything out of the subs except kick, bass and low keys (and maybe baritone and trombone if there are brass players) by only sending those to the sub. Then nothing else can feed back into the subs.

Great series. Thanks.

–Kevin

Andy Dolph · February 28, 2017 at 1:04 pm EST

Kevin has a number of good points… It had never occurred to me to try a 421 on kick, but I’m not surprised by what you’ve found… Yes – gating drum mics in general can be a big help, but it’s a bit fiddly until you get comfortable doing it… In fact on a lot of pop albums and live shows, it’s impossible to get the drum sound they get without heavily gating the drums. (individually)

Subs fed from an aux is one of my favorite tricks, particularly in a system with powerful subs – don’t send them anything that doesn’t need to go there – and then you can dial in the amount you want – that’s typically how I do subs in corporate events and most live theater situations.

Kevin is right on about comb filtering when you put speakers close together – there are some tricks to it, but the long and the short of it is that how much of a problem you have depends on the speakers you are using, and exactly how they are positioned next to each other. basically what you want to do is aim them by listening so that you line up the 6 db down point of the left speaker with the 6 db down point of the right speaker – that will help keep things even and minimise comb filtering – that said – don’t use 2 mains if one will do it – the 2nd box only ads 3db of volume (not normally noticeable) so only use a 2nd box if you need it for coverage…

Also – some of the modern speaker designs are MUCH Better behaved in terms of blending then many of the old standards – The QSC K12 is quite forgiving in that respect… so as always, listen and let your ears decide