More Music Gear

The second band I play in, Klaxon, a roadhouse rock band (unlike the Hoodoo Hounds, a blues band), is gearing up to play gigs around town in 2009. One of our guitarists, and the guy whose barn we practice in, just went out and picked up a 32-channel mixing board. It's a Yamaha MG32/14FX model, and it's honkin' big! I've no idea how they intend on carting the thing around to gigs, hopefully it's not too heavy. If you don't know what one of these is for, it's for plugging in and mixing (equalizing) all the various sound instruments that produce sound. Why 32 channels you ask? They want to run two channels per guitar (direct in and off the mic pointing at the amp). We have two 6-string electric guitars that trade off on lead/rhythm and one bass. That's 6 channels right there. The front man wants to play a bit of amplified acoustic guitar, so that's potentially two more channels. Meanwhile we all want to sing as well, with the front man singing lead vocals and the rest of us providing backup when needed. That's another 5 channels for vocal mics. I just ordered a Shure WH30XLR headset condenser mic with XLR connection so that I can sing without bumping into a mic hanging off a boom stand. I've already sung like this a couple of times at practice and even though I'm a crappy singer it served the purpose. I looked at some comments on drumming review web pages, and one drummer's comment really made sense. He said that he got tired of having his neck in a very constrained position when singing and of hitting the mic with his sticks. I knew exactly what he'd been talking about, so like him, I decided on a headset mic. So that's about 13 channels. And there are the drums...

Here's the Tama Rockstar acoustic kit I play on at practice. I traded my old Pintech electronic kit for this one since I like the way the toms sound and I wanted to replace the Pintech kit with Roland V-Drums. This kit got my Zildjian Z-custom cymbal pack (that I've replaced with individually selected cymbals on my Gretsch road kit) and now I've just miced it up with a 7-piece drum mic kit from Digital Reference. The drum mics look ok and were relatively cheap, but the mounts it came with sucked. Cheapo plastic snap-on things that I broke on my first try. Three of the four snapped as I tried putting them on the drum rims. So I ended up having to spend another $50 on mounting hardware from Musicians Gear. These clips are really good and screw on to the rims instead of snapping on. I liked them so much that I bought another set for my road kit since I've always been annoyed at having to reef on the plastic snaps I have with that mic set. Screwing on will be much easier. With 7 mics, that's another 7 channels and so we're up to 20. I suppose a 24-channel board would have been enough, but he said something about that mixer not having enough XLR inputs, so he just went for the 32-channel beast—I think every channel as XLR input, so we should now have plenty. I contributed a 24-channel snake that will connect everything on stage (24 channels anyway) to the board when we play. I guess Tuesday we'll spend some time on doing a sound check and learning how all this stuff works. I think I'll peruse the mixing board manual myself to see what all the knobs do.