How to Postition PA Speakers for Maximum Benefit

The first big decision you have to make when setting up in a venue is speaker placement. If will give you a few pointers to get you started and then you will have to use your ears.

1) Always place the main speakers in front of all the stage mics

2) Make sure your speakers are not in direct contact with the stage (especially the subs)

3) Make sure that your horns (tweeters) are high enough to reach the back of the crowd. It doesn't do you much good to have them so low they blow the ears off everyone in the front, and no one in the back can hear them.

4) Keep your speakers from aiming down the length of a wall. If you have to place speakers against a wall, make sure they are pointed slightly in towards the center of the room.

5) Always put your sub(s) directly on the floor. If possible, you can put them in a corner to increase the bass. The more surfaces it is in contact the louder it will be. (roughly 3dB per wall) Take advantage of free volume!

The most obvious place to put the speakers is on either side of the stage. If the stage does not cover the whole room, this will result in the best sound for the people who really want to hear the music (the people in front of the stage). Put your amp rack by the speaker nearest a wall outlet and plug up your speakers. After you get the rest of the PA set up, you will want to check the placement of the speakers.

Connect a CD Player to a line input of your mixer and play a disc you are extremely familiar with. It should be a song you have listened to on a number of different sound systems.

Every room will sound slightly different. The idea is to use a graphic EQ to minimize these characteristics. When you're finished, the CD should sound vaguely like it does in your car or home stereo (Of course this is not possible in every venue). You want to start by adjusting your crossover and changing the angle of your speakers to figure out what sounds best. While doing this, it's a good idea to keep your graphic EQ set flat (all the faders at center detent).

After you have adjusted your crossover and speaker positions, it is time to go back and fine tune with your graphic EQ. Boost each fader one at a time to get an idea what that particular frequency sounds like. As you do this, listen to the CD and try to figure out whether that frequency needs to be boosted or cut (or just left alone in most cases).

You shouldn't have to make any major changes on your graphic EQ. If you end up with a curve that looks like a big wave, you probably have a problem somewhere else in your system chain (or you have crappy speakers).

Unravel the Mystery of the Mixing Console

The mixer, usually called a mixing board or mixing console, is the heart of the sound system. Looking a mixing board can be intimidating at first, but once you understand the basics of how they're laid out, everything else is simple. Each vertical column (that's up and down for you scholars) is called a channel. Once you know what all the controls on one channel do, you basically understand the whole board, because it's just more of the same thing. The first thing you will notice at the top of a channel is a knob labeled Trim or Gain. This works with the fader at the bottom of the board to control the volume of the instrument in that channel. Along with the fader, this is the most important control on the channel. I will show you exactly how to use it in the next section.

Eq

Somewhere in the middle of the channel you will find the EQ section. All of the mixers that I will recommend (Allen&Heath, Soundcraft, Mackie, and Behringer) will use either a three or four band EQ. A three band EQ will have controls for hi, mid, and low frequencies. A four band will split the mid frequencies into hi-mids and lowmids.

All three bands will come in one of three different formats. The first is a fixed frequency or fixed EQ. With a fixed EQ, you can't choose what frequency to boost or cut. This is usually the way the high and low bands are set up. A fixed EQ section will be controlled by one knob to control the amount of boost or cut, just like on a home stereo.

The next type of EQ is called a sweepable or swept EQ. This type of EQ section has two knobs. It is just like the fixed EQ, but it adds another knob to adjust the frequency you want to boost or cut. The last type of EQ is a parametric EQ. If you end up with a board that has a parametric EQ, you'll probably want to leave the extra control alone for now. I'll go into more detail on this in the next section.

There may also be high-cut or low-cut switches in the EQ section. Low cut switches are VERY useful, for getting rid out low frequency noise and cleaning up a mix. Use it on every channel except the Kick, bass, floor toms, synths and other low frequency instruments, such as Bari-Sax or tuba (don't laugh, I've actually done sound for a few bands with tuba players!)

High cut buttons are useful in getting rid of high end hiss and noise, without losing the crispness of a vocal or instrument (very useful when the guitar player insists that INSISTS that he needs the presence control on 11 to get "his" sound). There may also be an "EQ in/out" button. This feature simply turns the EQ on and off, but is very useful to compare the "EQ'd" sound to the original one.

There! You now understand the different kinds of EQ controls on a mixing board. The EQ sections of most mixing boards take up much of the space on the board. You already know what all of those do after only three paragraphs. See, this isn't so hard! Lets go ahead and knock out another third of those knobs now that they don't seem so intimidating anymore.

Auxiliaries

The other large group of knobs on the channel strip will be labeled "aux sends". These are used for two purposes:

1) Creating monitor mixes for performers onstage

2) Adding effects such as Reverb and Echo.

Sends used for monitor mixes should be pre-fader. This just means that when you move the fader to adjust the volume of an instrument in the main speakers, its volume in the monitors stays the same. Post-fader sends are used for effects.

These sends respond to changes in volume (fader) level. That way, when you turn a vocal down, the reverb on it goes down too. Otherwise, the vocal would become drowned out when you lower the singer's volume. Some aux sends have switches to adjust whether they are pre or post. Others just come that way from the factory. Just remember: Pre for monitors; post for effects. If you get the two confused, just remember that your monitors always come first. These sends then go to the aux master sends, which adjust the volume of each mix in the same way that the main fader controls the volume of the main mix (the PA). You can think of each of these as a different master volume control for each monitor mix. Effects sends (post fader aux's) have to be returned to the board, so that they can be mixed in with everything else. Auxiliary returns are provided for this purpose, but I prefer to return the effects to a channel so that I can use the channel's EQ to help it blend with the mix. I know this all sounds confusing, just keep reading and it will all make sense in a minute.

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