[sdiy] OT: Live Sound advice needed

[Dave Krooshof]

Drowning is often masking.
Lower sounds mask the higher sounds, as a shade in the spectrum
from one tone over the ones directly above. Synths tend to produce
a lot of lows that are nicely warm at low levels, but become a problem
on high levels for two reasons:
- the responce curve of the ear gets flatter (more sensitive to bass and
high treble)
- the PA at house parties has a lot more bass that the typical home
enviroment.
So, a lot of your low mids are blurred by masking.
Sollutions are:
- Press the /100 Hz lowcut knobs on every channel on the mixer when
the connected instrument hasn't got the function of bassdrum
or basslines. This cleans out a lot of mud.
- distort/waveshape/eq the bassy sounds, so they get more overtones.
This will make em more audible, so you do need the real low to be as loud.
Notice modern R&B bassdrums have a lot of 4kHz!

Futhermore, you'll have a room full of talking and, hopefully, moving people,
masking the 400-1K area. Pump it up where needed on your mixer/eq,
if you find this effect in the gig, but not while soundchecking.

So far for masking effects in frequency, it happens in time too.
Your own room is smaller, and doesn't have too much of reverb, I guess.
Bigger places smear out your details in time. So if you can, use your
reverbboxes only where needed as effects. Also, notice that you will want
clear out the frequency area's where that particular room vibrates in.
That's the job for the boys doing the house PA, but they often didn't do it.
So you need to adapt yourself. This fenomena is worse in soundchecks, and
become noticebly less the more curly haired, soft skinned girls enter.

Futhermore, Give praise to the Masterers! They makah ourah recordza
sounda Fat and cleara in da larga hallsa! (use cartmans "do the handicapt
people go to hell? episode voice here.)
No realy, this field is still a mystery too me, and I notice my nicely mixed
cd's do not survive in big spaces, while commercial ones do. I wish I
fully understood why and how.

And as this considers using synths, I'd love to see this thread continued
with ideas and sollutions in this field. but indeed as it doesn't invlove
soldering we ought to keep the "OT" in the subject.

Dave