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Joined:
January 2006
Posts: 5881
Location: Colorado Rocky Mountains | When I go to a concert, I always arrive early so that I can walk up close to the stage and check out the gear. I’m almost always amazed at two things. First, the apparent mess and chaos. There are generally miles of cables running into all kinds of snakes and relay boxes, then to numerous racks of gear lit up like Christmas trees. I know everything has a purpose and the cables are all where they are supposed to be, but what a seemingly haphazard and disorganized mess. There was little room for the musicians. The second thing that I always look for is the odd little amp stuck somewhere on stage with a mic in front of it. This past weekend with Bela Fleck and Bruce Hornsby was no different. I’m sure they had no less than a dozen racks right up there on stage (plus another dozen on the sides), but over on the side was a little mic’d Fender Blues Jr. I don’t know its purpose, possibly for the keyboard player on his harmonica, or maybe the nearby saxophonist was using it in some way. Regardless, it looked totally out of place with the rest of the gear. The other piece that surprised me was the amp Bela Fleck was using for at least one of his banjos. It appeared to be an early Trace Elliot TA series acoustic amp with two rows of 5" speakers, one above and one below the control panel, with each row containing somewhere between four to six speakers (it was standing on end and part of it was hidden). It was the biggest TA series Trace I'd ever seen. There were a lot of cables connected to the amp and he fiddled with several of the knobs during his show, so it was obviously playing an important role in his sound output. I couldn’t get close enough to see their pedal boards, but there was a mess of them, too. I could no more be a live sound engineer than the man in the moon. The mess would drive me crazy. | |
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Joined:
January 2007
Posts: 137
Location: Massachusetts | Having talked with many sound engineers I've found out that the "little amp" is actually what the artist is using. The other amps that are visible to the audience are promotional products that the bands are being paid to exhibit to the public. | |
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Joined:
December 2001
Posts: 7224
Location: The Great Pacific Northwest | Originally posted by javaman:
Having talked with many sound engineers I've found out that the "little amp" is actually what the artist is using. The other amps that are visible to the audience are promotional products that the bands are being paid to exhibit to the public. For touring acts.. this is likely the case. However there are also times when the little amp has the tone the artist is looking for, and the big amps, just amplify it on stage. If there was a harp player, chances are the little amp was the amp he was using. The mic on the little amp is probably going to the PA and he hears it through the monitors.
There are several variations and the bottom line is... we use whatever it takes to make it sound the way we need it to sound.
Sometimes the stage amps will be used for stage volume...
I was at a Kiss Concert and the "Wall of Marchall's" were all video screens with the Marshall logo's displayed. Of course they displayed other things throughout the concert, but mostly they looked like amps..
This is what they look like...
and here they are something else...
"It's all part, of my rock'n roll fantasy...." | |
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Joined:
December 2001
Posts: 57
Location: Jersey near NYC | The Trace Acoustic amp you saw was likely a TA200, 200W stereo through 8x5" speakers. I've seen these on stage with a number of artists, notably Dave Matthews.
The scattered mess of cables is likely due to an old-school PA. Current pro systems use input channels in a rack on stage connected to the control surfaces at FOH and monitor world with a CAT 5 cable. All of the signal processing is either done 'in the box' or is controlled by a laptop at FOH. Power amps tend to be built into the cabinets now and are connected to the mix computer with 2 CAT 5 cables, one for digital signal, the other for control of speaker parameters (focus, EQ, volume, etc.).
If it was a quality regional soundco, blame the lighting guys.
KK | |
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Love to check out concert stage gear but what mess!