Category: Tips and Tricks

Well it’s that time, week 3 of our Tips and Tricks series (check out this link if you’ve missed the other posts), where we are going to briefly discuss the proper way to make guitars wireless and how to properly extend that guitar cable between the pedal board and the amp. Too many times I’ve seen guitar players or sound techs wanting to isolate the amp from the stage or run the show wireless and do so by running 60 foot long unbalanced cables everywhere to accommodate that need. Than, during rehearsal or the show they start hearing some interference and are all too quick to blame pedalboard’s or guitar pickups or grounding issues in the audio system. But, in this instance, maybe for once, it isn’t the ill-soldered pedalboard’s fault. Simply making a cable that has the right connectors on it won’t work as simply as you think it might. It’s important to maintain proper signal and impedance between the pedals and the amp to ensure that we aren’t attenuating or altering the signal in any way. The same applies if you want to make your guitar players wireless.

The first thing to consider is if you are plugging the guitar in wireless you are electronically balancing the signal in the receiver so you need to get it back to unbalanced guitar signal. We use the line output setting on the receivers and our sub snake system to get the signal back out to the players pedalboard. From there, radial makes a box called the Pro-Amp Studio Re-Amper. This box acts like a reverse direct box (because of the way you’ll likely plug it in you’ll also need a gender changer). It takes the balanced signal and through the use of a transformer changes it back to the unbalanced signal that the pedals are expecting. There is also a level attenuation adjustment in case it’s coming in too hot (never had to use this). You can also choose to lift the ground if there is an issue there as well. Here is a link from radial describing the box and a link to amazon if you would like to buy one. We keep a few around for use with any of our guitar players if necessary.

But that is only step one in the process. Step two is getting from the pedalboard back to the amp that has hopefully been isolated back stage or perhaps is in the corner.  Lots of people is this step will just get long guitar cables but this isn’t generally a good idea as it is an unbalanced signal. Over any length, if it comes close to power or just about anything magnetic you will start to hear interference from other sources get picked up and than get amplified by the guitar amp (I’ve done this before and under the right circumstances can work, but you have to be very careful about where that cable runs in order to avoid issues). In this situation you will want to use an SGI set from radial as well. This is a two box system with a power supply on the sending box (it does take a unique power supply so unfortunately can’t be powered by the pedalboard power supply). The SGI boxes take the unbalanced guitar signal, converts to balanced xlr (which can go 100 meters) and then reverses the process at the amplifier. Because we all have xlr infrastructure just about everywhere, these boxes are really helpful and useful. Once again, lots of folks will just use a long guitar cable but the same issues that we dealt with in the last step still apply here. These boxes, while I understand is another expense, really ensure clean and proper signal flow between the pedals and the amp. Several players I’ve known were hesitant at first after having issues in the past when people attempt to just use cables to convert or don’t convert at all having signal degradation issues. But after doing this they are sold. Here are some links like we did above: informational page from radial, purchasing link from amazon.

So just to reiterate, we go from guitar to wireless pack, to receiver, back to the pedalboard, through the Studio Re-Amper, through the pedals, into the SGI TX box, back to the amps, through the SGI RX box, and into the amp. As long as you follow this path, everything will turn out exactly like it should. I know, I know, shortcuts are easier and cheaper but as sound techs we are here to support the band as best that we can, this is the way to do that. Ensuring clean audio is especially important in the studio, which is where these products were developed but they work so well everywhere else, you’ll see them in a variety of roles. It wasn’t until more recently I even knew about them and just had to deal with issues from isolating amp cabinets but with this knowledge now, I definitely won’t go back. If you don’t even have the SGI pairs, please consider picking up one or two pairs, I promise they will save you at least a few hours of headache.

That’s it for this week, hopefully you better understand the correct way to move guitar signal around and have the ability to improve your setup as necessary. As always feel free to comment below or email us at engineers@studiostagelive.com, and we will answer as soon as we possibly can. See you next week!

This is week two of our current tips and tricks series where I’ll be discussing gating drums and how to set them up the best way. Last week in the series, we discussed things that I do in order to get full piano/pad sounds on a stage with a full band as well. If you missed it check it out at this link. This week we are going to touch on using gates on drums, what not to do, and the little tricks to make the best of whatever you have. For the sake of discussion, lets already assume that you have your drums tuned and that you’ve chosen the best mic from what you have to suit each drum.

So, you’ve decided that you would like to use a gate on your drums. Not at all uncommon. There are some that are afraid of gates because you might miss out on a hit that you may need or simply don’t have the know-how to turn it on and set it up right and many more that use them religiously. The benefits to gating are quite apparent, most of which include the elimination of sounds entering your mix beyond what you are looking for from that input and secondarily controlling how much sustain that sound is allowed. For those reasons, gates are generally used on percussive inputs over less instantaneous and more sustained inputs like vocals or keys. Personally, the majority of my gating shows up on the drum sets with some very minor use on guitars to automatically rid me of that pesky tube noise coming from amps or hums from pickups. But before we get into this it’s important to go over the terms. There are 5 key terms to be aware of and unfortunately, each board uses different numerical schemes for these variables so you really just have to play around until you like what you are hearing and seeing happen within your console.

Range – the amount the input is lowered by if the audio input is beneath the threshold.

Threshold – this is the input level required to open the gate

Attack – attack is how fast the attenuation is released from the input after the audio levels pass the threshold

Hold – the time after the audio goes back under the threshold but before the attenuation starts again is referred to as the “hold”

Release – this is how fast the attenuation kicks in after the audio is beneath the threshold and after the hold time has been completed.

Here is a graph that shows what these mean if that would help you to understand things better. I know it helped me a lot when I was learning (if you click on it, you can look at a bigger version.

Through most of my career mixing I’ve just gated the regular way, by using the audio from the microphone as the thing that triggers the gate to open. This works pretty well.  I have always been able to gate the bottom snare, kick in (if I have one), and the toms. This has allowed me to be able to control the non-useful ambient sounds of the drum kick that I don’t need. Sounds like snare in my kick and cymbals in the tom inputs. Usually on these gates I’d run a range of about -20db, thresholds set with some wiggle room to allow dynamic playing by the drummer, attacks that are about as fast the board with go without added any weird sounds, small amount of hold, and a release times between 150ms and 300ms. While these settings didn’t work for everything, they worked for most things. I unfortunately couldn’t really gate the snare top or the kick out mic (the one in the hole) because they lose their punchiness and attack while gated, this is because the gate couldn’t react fast enough while it’s being triggered by the acoustics of the drum. While you are still significantly better having gated bottom snare and tom mics, there is still some bleed that is especially noticeable in the drum verbs and the cymbals and hi hat still leak into mics all over the place because the other kick and snare mics are wide open. There are little things you can do to help (like using a dynamic EQ to created a frequency based gate) but you still can’t really gate the whole kit and really suck out that bleed unless you are editing in post production. However, there is one way….

That other way is by drum triggers. No no no, we aren’t talking about triggering recorded sounds to play with the drum is hit (though these can be used for that) but rather using a different type of mic that reacts faster in order to open up the drum gates. Drum triggers use a vibration pickup similar to that of some acoustic guitars that is much more sensitive than standard mics. This does of course require some extra inputs and a sound board that externally key a gate but most modern consoles have that ability to do this. For the kick drum you’ll need this trigger and for the rest of the drums, you’ll need this trigger. Just a heads up, you do actually need to get the kick drum trigger because of the difference in the rim on the kick being much deeper than in the snare and toms. After you get them installed on the drum hoops of your drums, I just plugged those into a DI and straight into the board. I’ve heard that you can make a cable instead of going through the DI but I haven’t tried that. So that is something to try if you don’t have any extra DI’s sitting around. We just used an 8-way radio DI because we had one sitting around because the 8th channel was broken. From there we patched each trigger to a channel so we could do whatever we needed to with the sound before we used it than set the external keys on basically the whole drum set excluding cymbals, ride, and hi-hat. I was really skeptical at first that we still wouldn’t be much better off but surprisingly, it was amazing! Because the triggers pick up vibrations not sound waves, they picked up the softer sounds much more effectively. We gated both kick mics to the kick trigger, both snare mics to the snare trigger, and each tom to itself. The very first week, without being prompted one of our more professional drummers came up asked what we did because the drums sounded so much tighter and clean. This also really cleaned up the verbs which had a profound effect on the slop in the drum sounds. Even on the ballads, I just make a quick adjustment to the thresholds to make sure they open for all the ghost notes. Just like that, I can gate just about everything all time. Personally I don’t gate any brass (cymbals, hi hat, ride) because I still want some drum set sounds so they don’t sound like samples and with setup, I still get plenty. Settings on the triggers are about the same just with a lower threshold because everything but the threshold can really shape the actual sound which we still want to happen. The only thing I use the triggers for is to speed up the gate opening, and for that they have been flawless so far. The biggest thing is that even on the softer songs I don’t have to adjust the gate near as much because of the sensitivity of these triggers and we can still get all those ghost notes without having to automate the gates on and off.

Now, I know that not everyone can afford to buy the triggers for their whole kit right away or have enough extra inputs to plug them all in, so if that’s the case, I’d focus on getting one or two triggers and putting them on your snare and the tom closest to your snare. These usually are the two that produce the most bleed so if you have to limit yourself, just try to get one or maybe two and get started with that. I promise you’ll be happy. As always, don’t just take my settings and run, be sure to test things in your room. What works for me may not work for you, so no matter what, put the trigger in, bring up some playback if you have some, and just start using your ears.

Next we will be looking at setting up guitars to be wireless the right way so that pedal boards and amps can all get the right signals. As always please feel free to tell your friends about the blog and subscribe at this link if you haven’t already! See you next time!

Welcome to our new 5 week series from the Tips and Tricks section. This category is all about peeking behind the curtain of what the pros do to bring their mix to the next level. This week we are going to talk about getting great Piano and Keys sounds and over the following 4 weeks we will discuss the dynamics of drums and effective gating, properly setting up guitars for wireless packs, getting the most out of your tracks inputs, and leveraging google to improve documentation and backup of your critical files. These are the topics you probably won’t hear many people talk about or see as the subject in breakouts at your local tech conferences but they are all things that if you don’t do well, will greatly impact your recording session and/or service.

As I just mentioned, this week is all about the piano and keys. We all know the battle here, feedback vs. tonality. Often by the time you’ve gotten that perfect sound from your piano with the perfect locations/combination of microphones, you then add in the band and it’s all messed up or causing all kinds of feedback with the PA at full volume. Why is that? Well to be fair, you did just put two condenser mics on a stage with a live drum set. Be something must be done. You have that piano out there for two probably reasons, the first and most common is just that your grand piano sounds better than your keyboard and brings a certain aesthetic to the stage that people like to see. Probably a lot better. The second is feedback and bleed. Whenever you mic up piano on a band stage with a drum set and full band, you are always fighting bleed from your PA and the drum set and that all brings feedback. Believe it or not there is a solution to be had, in fact, I’m going to propose two!

The first option involves making sure your have a great keyboard or if you can’t afford a new one, have spent a fair amount of time going through and picking the right settings on what you have and going out into your space with the keyboard and really dialing in the sound your PA gives it as well. Even cheap keyboards can be made to sound fairly good with some effort. If you do have a little money than I’d recommend one of two options. The first is to look for a Nord Stage keyboard. This is the keyboard you will see a lot of touring bands use. That is because it sounds amazing. The keys are perfectly weighted and feel like you are playing a real piano rather than just being spring loaded like most keyboard. If you can’t afford the full Nord Stage than they have a version that is just piano without the extra sounds and patched for pads or organ, it’s called the Nord Piano and is priced a bit more affordably. If that is still a bit steep for you check out Roland’s new Juno Keyboard. It’s keys are also weighted really well and this keyboard has been critically acclaimed by several recording artists. But I know what you are thinking, it looks like a keyboard. It doesn’t have that grand piano or upright piano look that I really like. Well, there is a solution for that as well.  A few years ago before we had really refined our keys setup at CCC we had a guest artist come in for our Christmas show and he needed a piano to play. We knew that we didn’t want to have a live mic’d baby grand on stage with the band but that we needed the piano to sound amazing. So, we took out the action of the piano (the keys, pedal system, basically everything but the strings) and slid in our Nord Stage in the hole we had just created. We then hid all the necessary cables by using the piano structure itself to hide everything. With that setup, we got the look of a baby grand on stage for Christmas with the lid open and shiny brass strings, with the clean and crisp sound of the Nord keyboard without any of the feedback or bleed issues we would usually have. For the first time we had our cake and ate it too! But it doesn’t take a baby grand piano to do this, most 88 key keyboards will fit within upright pianos as well.  At CCC, we had a volunteer who wanted to get rid of her family’s half-height upright simply because no one was playing it anymore so we took it, took the action out and slid in our Nord and voila, every weekend we have great keyboard sounds within the aesthetic feels of an upright piano shell. No microphones needed, just a pair of DIs for the outputs of the keyboard. This also works well in the studio for those music video shoots as well and larger band recordings where bleed can be a real issue but aesthetics matter.

The other option a lot of touring groups and churches alike are doing now is using a program called Mainstage. This is a keyboard software that is sort of like the dark horse of the apple software suite in that it never seems to get enough attention but a ton of people are using it. Mainstage is an awesome little $30 piece of software capable of so many things. It comes with a generic suite of sounds that are pretty good but where the good stuff comes in is the sounds you can add. The top three that we use are Native Instruments, Omnisphere, and Alicia’s Keys. Yes, you read that right. There is a patch for Mainstage that is the model of the keyboard that Alicia Keys uses not only for her album but also for her tours. If you pick up mainstage, buy an apple computer (or if you already have one), and pickup some good sounds, mainstage becomes basically the cost of a Nord Piano (potentially cheaper if you already have a mac to run it on). But remember the keyboard you get to work with mainstage is just as important. We used to to use an Akai keyboard that worked pretty well but after a few issues, we just switched to our Nord, which has midi connectivity, to just be the controller for us. All of our players prefer to use the keyboard on the Nord over everything else we’ve used in the past so it just worked out really well. We also wire in the main outputs up so we have a backup keyboard if Mainstage decides to just not work (haven’t had this happen yet but we are ready just in case). There is a definite learning curve here but with mainstage you can get Leslie B3 models, really nice and smooth electric pianos, pads, strings, or really anything you desire. I believe you can also make your own patches from recorded sounds. On top of that, all the sounds are of great quality and can be tweaked to work well in your space or desired sound. Mainstage is basically a plugin rack for your piano. When used wisely, it can be one of the best things you can do. You can also, for that extra cherry on top, can download and use the mainstage patches from bands like hillsong or elevation when you sing one of their songs to get the actual sounds they use.

Well that is it for this primer on great piano sounds. Be sure to comment below with the tricks you use to get that perfect piano sound in your mix. I love learning something new so please, feel free to email me as well at daniel@studiostagelive.com. As always, if you are new to the blog and would like to receive weekly updates or just when new content is released just follow this link, fill out the form real quick, and hit submit. See you next week!