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Why have a nice rig just to be run direct?

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#101
I'm with you. The only time I'm getting PA is outdoors and large halls where the stage is pretty well acoustical free space, no reason for the sound out of my cab not to be as useable as the DI.

My budget mic gets all the low end which I eq down, my cab has the tweeter turned off, and still some soundguys Boom & Clank me.
 
#102
I have the same experience; to generalize it seems bad sound guys are particularily bad at dialing in the bass and the bass drum. Too loud and too boomy usually.

There's one particular place we play sometimes that is a difficult room to begin with, and then the "sound guy" is the bar owner's friend who likes to help out with sound ... you can guess the rest. :)
 
#103
El Raro said:
I've never had a problem running direct and using my cab as a stage monitor. I've listened back to a few live performances and my bass tone always sound good. Might be because a lot of my EQing goes down on my pedalboard, though. Not gonna pretend to know what I'm talking about in regards to live sound.

What the crowd hears is more important than what I hear.
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I heard those arguments very often but I'm more on the side of classical musicians like a piano player or player of violin or cello, or a hammond organ.
 
#105
From studio work I learned to let my bass + effects + maybe the pre-amp be the significant parts. My cabinets are never mic'ed, and since I went the fEARful road I guess that's not even necessary anymore.
I hate the DI vs. MIC discussion and eventually the musician is gonna loose as long as he doesn't pay the soundsman salary.
My two DI channels are taken between pre-amps and Power-amp - all sound-significant parts are in the DI. the power-amp and the cabinets are neutreal, so yes - they are just deluxe² stage monitors.
Unless of course, there's no PA

Edit: Forgot to mention that this is very personal and subjective. Many players consider their amps/cabinets a crucial part of their sound, and in that case you should do anything to get it MIC'ed. It might be a good idea though to have your own microphone
 
#106
vbchaos said:
Edit: Forgot to mention that this is very personal and subjective. Many players consider their amps/cabinets a crucial part of their sound, and in that case you should do anything to get it MIC'ed. It might be a good idea though to have your own microphone
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Or a decent passive DI that can be linked to the power amp out.
Not all sound techs can provide a passive DI. Sometimes they have got only active ones.
 
#108
JimmyM said:
Oh, and just to put out this fire that I know is inevitably about to start, I once had a soundman tell me that I had too much low end dialed into my rig and he was having a hard time dealing with it in the room, and I turned it down a notch and he was happy and so was I.

Talk to me like a man, I react like a man. Start barking orders to me or resort to subterfuge and trickery, and I let them know whose gig it is.
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This Saturday's gig, I actually had a soundman come up and say "I hear you're even more of a gear nerd than I am...I can't wait to hear the DI on this thing." I nearly fell over. :) I usually can persuade a soundman that my DI will be just fine for him (don't even mention post-EQ), and it doesn't get anywhere as heated as some other things can.

Fer instance, we have a new guitarist who decided to write a song and pitch it to us after a week as a full time member. He actually came in and said "Here's the bass line I wrote for you"...which earned him laughter from everyone and silence from me. That 'session' didn't last very long. I don't even play Aston Barrett's lines the way he wrote them...what makes anyone think I'll be doing theirs? ;)
 
#109
JimmyM said:
Oh, I forgot...you're the most special person on earth. Wow, must be awesome to be the greatest person in the history of your mind.
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Actually that best describes you. It seams like your always whining when you don't get your way. :D It is nice to see you supporting my dinosaur theory. You were playing a gig using a 50 year old amp. I bet you were playing one of those new-fangled precision basses also.
 
#110
modulusman said:
Actually that best describes you. It seams like your always whining when you don't get your way. :D It is nice to see you supporting my dinosaur theory. You were playing a gig using a 50 year old amp. I bet you were playing one of those new-fangled precision basses also.
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Time for Jimmy to post that Precision Lyte that he goes on about?
 
#111
I think at that show I was still playing the 98 MIA Jazz I used to have. Loved that bass...too bad it wrecked my shoulder by being insanely heavy. The rest of the stuff he said I'm going to take the high road and ignore.
 
#112
I'm usually of the mindset that unless you are running a full tube rig, then a post EQ DI should be enough. As I play more, I do find myself wanting to get a nicer DI sound and get a cab that is more neutral. Since my band plays a lot in NYC and Philly, we don't always have the option of using our own cabs (we don't budge on our heads) and I pretty much only get mic'd when we hire our own soundguy. Even if I were to get mic'd at every gig, it wouldn't be on my own cab and the end result would probably be inferior to the DI tone anyway. I realize that not every market is like this and you usually do get do use your own rig much more frequently outside of there, but I just find myself wanting to make my rig a bit more sensible for the markets that we are in.
 
#113
Part of a longer post that I'm writing on this topic...

A lot of you say that the best bands have their own soundmen, they sound great, etc...

I use an Acoustic 370 all the time (my only amp) and back then I had a 2ohm 2x15... the head has no DI, I was not micing back then (I'll explain my whole story in novel format later when I have the time), but I was told by other people that the unbalanced Monitor Outputs could be used with a DI, so that's what I did.

Last summer we played a gig that was very important to us - we played the band's first ever show in the home town of our drummer and singer (who's also a founding member from 30 years ago). It was in one of the outliyng cities (I guess you could say - suburbs) of Warsaw, funded by the town, so we had good money and the prospect of more gigs organized by those people. It was special to us and pretty big. Because of that, we got our own sound guy for the gig. We wanted to make sure everything sounded the best it could. When we got there he immediately started criticizing the PA, the (apparently crappy) soundboard and the other sound guy (who was there for the other bands playing that day, and who came from a local community centre where he takes care of musical and PA equipment, etc). He made it seem like he knew what he was doing, knew his stuff, and was above the foolishness of the local sound dude who was a good guy but seemed helpless in terms of doing his job at times. So, before the gig our guy decided to go and get all of his gear - that includes his own board and related electronic mumbo-jumbo. Sure enough, he took our van home to Warsaw to get everything. Came back, hooked everything up, DI'd my rig of course, we played the soundcheck, everything seemed fine, then came the time for the show and we were headlining...

...so how did it turn out? Afterwards, we got into talks with the organizers to do more gigs and that went OK. Very positive response from the audience. But, my sound? Weak bass on the recording from the board (Zoom H4n hooked up to a line out), pretty much no bass out front (verified through audience recordings), and it seems that I played the whole gig with my microphone apparently turned off or at least not going out to the PA, even though we didn't complain about anything on stage. So a very important lesson was learned that day, and that's one "personal sound guy" for ya.
 
#114
Panek said:
So a very important lesson was learned that day, and that's one "personal sound guy" for ya.
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This is why, to this day even with our paid sound guy who has now been with us for 2.5 years, I walk out front and roam around during sound check to see what the overall tone is like. A couple of us do this, and if we don't like something, we tell the sound guy. Over the past bunch of shows, we haven't had to make any tweaks as the guy knows us and knows what we're looking for. In fact, we're at the point now where sound check is pretty damn quick as he usually has everything close from the first note (helps that we play the same medium sized venues all the time).
So while you had "your sound guy" that you hired, you still need to double check him/her, and just because you're paying them for one gig doesn't mean they'll do a better job, if they have no familiarity with you or your band.
 
#116
georgestrings said:
It doesn't necessarily have to be passive - as has been mentioned, a Countryman can handle a speaker level signal, and they're actice...


- georgestrings
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The Radial Engineering JDI does the job as well, but adds a confirmed 12" speaker simulation to this feature.
All other actice Radial DIs probably don't fit a requirement for linking to a 300 Watt at 4 Ohm power amp out.
These DI provide only -15dB attenuation at the input plug which is probably too less attenuation for sufficient performance of the input stage.
 
#119
Ideal situation: mic'd cab, DI to the board and then mixed.

I like running my cabs on the stage at just the right level and having no bass through the monitors at all. Makes life easier for everyone, also means everyone can hear the bass and I can roam around as I like. I like the sound of a good cab, but ultimately if it sounds good to the audience and I trust the soundguy to do a good job, I'm alright.

I should get a good mic for my cab though.
 
#120
Roy Vogt said:
I bring my own DI and fight fire with fire....I know my DI (Fishman Platinum Preamp) and can get a good tone from it. Of course, you're at the mercy of the guy behind the board.
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As always, but at least if you have the tools that you like going into the board, you stand a fighting chance of getting a sound you like in the PA.
 
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