Mastering for Live PA

devnull · Post by **devnull** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 5:11 am

Hey guys

Just out of curiosity... when you do a live PA, what is the best way to give your sound a more mastered sound? Would it be best to run a mastering program like Izotope on your master channel?

lowpass · Post by **lowpass** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 7:08 am

huh? wut?

collective · Post by **collective** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 7:48 am

use a soft limiter, and some bused compression to beef up the sound but you should be fine as long as you keep an eye on your levels.

macc · Post by **macc** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 10:45 am

Fairly gently does it IMO.

Talk to the FOH bloke a LOT before the gig, see what gear he has and get him to push it. Careful gain staging will have it thumping AND clean. They're bound to have a limiter of some sort in front of their system, let your stuff work it rather than absolutely slamming it flat before it even gets there. Be sure to go and stand back and check it out, go with your gut instinct.

I used to do a fair amount of proccessing to make sure everthing sounded good before a show, but not spank everything. Various people commented a number of times that my set sounded huge compared to most of the other things on the night. It may have been cos I was hammering the drums which helps, hehe, but the FOH man (or woman!) is definitely key.

(Is this the same devnull from SC btw?

)

devnull · Post by **devnull** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 1:23 pm

Hey Macc

Thanks for the advice. Nah I am new to this, so not the guy you are thinking of I guess. Just a nerd same as the guy you must be thinking of if we have the same nick

macc · Post by **macc** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 2:08 pm

Thinking about this a bit more - have something handy in your out put just in case they give you a jack input and say 'there's your front of house'

It happens. In live stuff you never know what's going to go wrong, but rest assured that it will

pandacub · Post by **pandacub** » Sun Mar 22, 2009 1:15 pm

do you mean playing off a laptop for a live set?

if so I've messed around with a few things that have given me different results...
I dont know whether or not the science is correct but the sound benifitted from getting a bit bigger and more like waht you'd expect...

I initially found that out of my laptop (reson set up) things were sounding a bit dull... I thried a few of the reason-y mastering packages... but the 'taste' of reason works in headphones and hifi speakers but sounded 'orrible through a decent system... (we're running an 18k rig and reasons nasty digital ringyness was amplified too much) so I satred using an external sound card... with that the headroom went up a bit and the clarity got less ringy... but in a moment of 'fuck-it-lets-see-what-happens-if...' i ran the out put from my soundcard(phono) through a little DI box, and then i got the wieght that I'd got in headphones back... the DI box drives the sugnal then so your laptop doesnt haveto, and it can just concerntrate on sounding together and nice...

as Macc (big up btw) said its all a case of doing things little by little, dont have any volumes, gains, or anything more than half way up and everthing should coast effortlessly...

there are loads of DI boxes around some cost lots, the one I've used cost about a tenner... cheap but effective,

if youre not not talking about laptops, just ingnore everything you just read...

safe

p. cubby

Mastering for Live PA

Mastering for Live PA

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