Now thats my kinda gig!

You may have noticed from the blog posts so far that I generally get more excited about the “different” gigs! This one was certainly different!

It was only a school’s graduation mass. But it was in an Olympic sizes basketball court, and there was a choir and a small band to work around! The place came also with a free 12 second reverb!!

The Room

The venue - an Olympic sized basketball court!

The first challenge was getting over the extra long reverb that the room naturally created. You could not understand someone shouting across the hall at you! It would be impossible to have a conversation.

So we deployed a system of “delay” speakers midway down the hall. The aim of this was to keep the SPL, or overall volume lower but with even coverage throughout the entire hall. There will be a blog post soon on this very topic which will go into more detail on delays and how they work.

Basically though, we measured the distance between the main speakers and our delay speakers, and taking the air temperature into account, we worked out the time it would take for the sound to travel from the main speakers to the delays and programmed the system accordingly.

The Stage

The Stage

The stage contained an alter and a podium. I put a nice goose neck AKG podium mic on the podium, and a Shure SM87 on a stand in front of the alter.

There were many different guests and students speaking at the podium, so I compressed that channel quite hard to save me mixing it too much. When some people were talking it took nearly 18dB’s of gain out, while others didn’t even hit the compressor.

The same went for the alter – sometimes the priest was directly in front of the mic, and other times he was quite far away and off axis to it. I just compressed it very hard to keep it even.

The Band and Choir

The "Choir"

Ok, band may be a bit of an exaggeration. There were 2 acoustic guitars and an electric piano. We DI’d all of these, and placed 2 wedges in the area so the choir could hear the band. I also sent a small bit of the Alter mic to those wedges so the choir could hear their cue from the priest.

In front of the choir, I placed 2 AKG condensor mics quite high. In between these 2 stands there was a Shure SM58 for some solo songs.

The Mix!

Small size, but all the power I needed - 01V!

I decided to mix on the Yamaha 01v for its flexibility and power in such a small size. I needed lots of compressors for this gig, and the 01v was the right choice with these built in.

I wasn’t aware that the lights were being turned off half way through the mass to show a slide show presentation, so I grabbed the nearest candle and managed to see the desk again! Other than that, the gig couldn’t have gone better – a bit of maths and lots of smart thinking rescued a gig which could have been a disaster!

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