Quote:
Originally posted by Flash@TMB:
We have 6x300W powered wedges and a powered sub that run straight off the desk through 6 of the aux channels. One of the wedges daisy chains into the sub to provide a full range stack that acts as the drum monitor. I had assumed that there would be some sort of passive crossover in the sub for this application but if there is it toally sucks!
The purpose of the sub is to deliver the kick drum sound to the drummer. Because the kick drum sound travels away from the drummer, it is impossible for the drummer to hear the kick drum once the rest of the band fire up. We use a sub because it delivers the whooomp feeling to the drummers arse. In a manner of speaking. The sub itself can deliver a range of frequencies from sub base to low mid.
The problem had arisen due to the wedge being daisy chained into the sub. The sub and wedge were effectively acting as one big monitor, and apparently without a decent crossover to separate the frequencies. The meant the sub was delivering some of the low mid from the vocal - something it's not particularily good at reproducing. The result was feedback and a muddy effect through interaction with the vocal mics. It's not possible to EQ out the low mid from the sub without inadvertantly removing it's presence from the wedge also. The effected frequency band is really wide so the monito would sound well dodgy without it.
The solution is to split the sub and the wedge and send separate monitor feeds to them, just pushing a nicely compressed kick drum signal through the sub. I'm confident this will clear up this issue.
The minor downside is that with the sub using it's own aux channel I have to do away with one of the wedges, leaving 'only' 5 wedges, 2 at the front, 2 at the sides, and 1 at the back with the sub. We were previously using 3 at the front. This isn't too big a deal because there is lot's of headroom left on the monitors, the vocal was coming in at -10dB, and with the feedback eliminated we can start to crank the monitor mix a lot higher.
Flash
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That's not gonna work, buy a crossover and feed the drum monitor signal through that before sending to your sub and wedge D/F amps.
The reason it won't work is because the kick drum doesn't just produce sub frequencies, there is also the 'click' to take into account. This high end definition of the kick is a very important part of the sound and provides the definition required for the drummer to hear rather than feel the individual beats, especially if there's some double pedal action happening there. The same applies to bass guitar which some drummers rely on as well.
If you're metering off your desk -10dBFS is already ouputting near to max (approx +4 dBu) so you don't have any headroom to play with.
300W seems a bit low for a wedge, I normally use about 600-650W wedges and frequently have to push them to the max
Tip: Try to keep what's in the monitor mixes to the minimum. on such a small stage with monitors coming in from the side as well you'll get a lot of spill on your mikes which affects the FOH sound as well. If only we could train mics to only pick up the sounds we wanted them to life would be so much easier.