Kensington Audio Team

Weekend – Troy Mar 1-2

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:47:28 +0000

Just to preface, this is my first post to the KCC audio blog.

This weekend, so far, has been a pretty cool weekend. It’s funny, I haven’t run sound in a LOOOONG time; even still I jumped right back in, trying new micing techniques where possible. I say that because most of my band is direct input, basically the only mics on stage are the Drums. So, I’m making the best of it.

Tim and I talked this week about trying a little unconventional technique and the conversation really confirmed my thoughts about how we have been treating drums for a while. Often I sit and listen to the mixes from campus to campus and I think to myself that doesn’t sound at all like it sounds when I stand next to the drummer.

As many of you know, I really try to run sound from a minimalist standpoint and at many points, and I have been known to mic drums with just a kick mic and overheads. This weekend I didn’t go quite as extreme, but I have relying on the mics pretty heavily for my drum sound. The overheads are a pair of AKG condensers in an XY pattern directly over the head of the drummer, and kick is the b52 inside the drum. The rest of the kit is md421 on snare, sennheiser lipstick on hat, and e604s on the toms. I have really been happy with the overall drum sound; the best part about it is that I can truly say that I am closer to experiencing the sound that the drummer is experiencing.

The closer medley has a real cool feeling; Danny and the band are really playing musically. My biggest beef with worship music on the week, is that a lot of the musicians basically read the chart from the top down, and ignore the nuances of playing musically. This weekend Jim’s band has really done a great job with this tune, and given me something really impactful to mix.

P.S. great job TIM on tuning the system in.

-Ameen

Weekend – West Feb 24th

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:46:07 +0000

This was an intense week of a very gifted band and the levels were amazing..

Oh wait.. That was the ipod.. Haha

All in all the weekend was fairly uneventful!

-Bryan

Weekend – North Feb 24th

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:45:26 +0000

It was easy.

-Josh

Weekend – East Feb 24th

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:45:03 +0000

ho-hum, not alot for the day. The “drama” actually went very well in first service, second service – what we expected, people not speaking into the mics, etc. Nothing to really report on for this weekend from an audio perspective.

-Dennis

Weekend – West Feb 17th

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:43:55 +0000

This weekend at birmingham felt awkward on my side with a new singer who
“hadn’t sung in front of a crowd before”. The reason for the awkwardness was
due to the coaching that she needed to learn on singing into the mic and how
that affected her sound. She actually grabbed it quite well and ended up
doing a decent job.

I had one experience with the m7 that I still haven’t quite pinpointed what
happened. We got off and rolling with our sound check and prelude and
everything was moving along fine. I had started saving scenes in the 20′s
block and got everything set up to the first song. I think copied the
prelude scene and pasted it into scene 22. I then made a few adjustments and
stored the scene. After storing the scene all the head amp controls moved to
-4 and all of the levels were off as well as monitor mixes. After trying to
recopy the scene to the same scene number (22) I then moved up to 23 and
copied the prelude scene there, and experienced the same situation.
Following this I then moved the prelude settings up to the 30′s scene range
and experienced no problems. Odd I know but I will be looking more into
this weekend.

On the final song, I used an MD421 with a short stand with a boom and had
the mic at the bottom of the djembe and was fairly pleased with the sound.

Weekend – East Feb 17th

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:42:46 +0000

Interesting weekend with the ice the band was nearly 30 minutes late which put a real squeeze on the whole morning process. There were a couple cabling issues in the day and the lack of an A2 allowed me to get my cardiac exercise in for the day. One was a monitor cable got plugged in wrong so a quick swap at the rack fixed it. The other seemed to possibly be a board issue, I swapped all the cabling and still couldn’t get a signal on channel 15 of the snake. I finally patched it to another input on the snake. I will have time this next Sunday due to the lack of any live elements to check it out. Really struggled with the “Dreamer” song the vocalist was new, she had never worked with a live band or monitors, she really struggled so in turn we all did. On the verses she just didn’t project at all and I couldn’t get any clarity but when she hit the chorus she let it rip and it just cut through (although a bit flat). In spite of all this it was a powerful service.

-Dennis

Weekend – North Feb 17th

timcorder — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:41:58 +0000

Sunday we got a late start, as a result of 2 things:

1. We missed an email from he band so we where in the dark as to what they where all bringing.
2. The monitors where all mixed up so it cut like 10 minutes in to our rehearsal to figure it out. Just shows how important it is to do an early preliminary check on those things.

It ended up going well, and i was pretty happy with how everything was sounding.

Sam

Weekend – Troy Feb 10th

timcorder — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:33:22 +0000

The service was packed with musical elements, (which I was excited about), and it was actually a lot of fun to mix. The band was great. Most of the challenges I had were on Saturday night.

Monitor mixes seemed to be a little elusive to find on Saturday and every mix changed after the vocalist were added (In-ears are much more sensitive in this area and an additional vocal mic can also act as a pseudo ambiance mic and make the mix feel cloudy). I also started using the channel copy, and channel move features on the PM1D and Its really cool.

Tim suggested that I use multiple channels one for the “normal” vocal sound and one for a small effected part of the song, just mute and unmute each channel to go back and forth (make sure that monitor levels are consistent on both channels otherwise you’ll be cutting in and out of the monitors) It worked really well and I will use it again.

-Kyle

Weekend – North Feb 10th

timcorder — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:31:56 +0000

The weekend went well. I had a little trouble with the American Idol piece. Since everyone is coming together right in front of the front monitors I had to battle a little feedback, which caused me to hold back on the vocals more than I would’ve liked. Don’t know if anyone else had that problem. Dans keyboard, however, was money so that was great for the prelude.

-Josh

Weekend – West Feb 10th

timcorder — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:31:03 +0000

We had a ROCKING weekend at birmingham and the band sounded amazing. The learnings I had taken from this weekend was to talk more through with the vocalists to work on a consistent location with their microphone as they sing and for dan, to keep the mic our of the monitor! Lol

A few things I tried lately are trying different depths on kick drum mic and I have used the MD421 on a guitar amp rather than the e609. I do like that mic on the guitar amps better..

In my consistent struggles to understand Eqing better I found the following resource:

http://www.berkleeshares.com/production__technology/eq_band_critical_listening

I haven’t fully gone through it yet, but I will let you know…

-Bryan