gdougherty
06-06-2009, 06:07 PM
I'm the preferred sound engineer for the Denver Municipal Band. Pretty easy gig, they own their own PA gear, decent Renkus Heinz tops, a single QSC PLX amp, two handfuls of EV dynamic mics and a little powered Yamaha mixer with 8 mic channels. Don't need the amp section unless they've got a vocalist.
To make it short, the mixer is a pain. No groups, no channel mutes, no gates so switching between band and conductor/MC involves pulling down all the faders and starting from scratch/memory each song. I've taken my O1v a time or two, but that's about an 80lb rack to lug about. This was my impetus for purchasing SAC so quickly. Laptop, M-Audio ProFire2626 and I've fully replaced their little mixer.
The sound was great, everything just kind of popped in the mix today. Having gates and compressors for all the channels was awesome. Having more than a low/mid/high eq section was gorgeous. No monitors to mix, setup some VCA's for the whole band and just the horn sections (brass, keys, bass and drums) perfect first outing for SAC. Ran on my Vista laptop at 4x64 with a few dropped buffers per minute, but not bad and nothing audible. I'm going to rebuild with XP Pro this week and see if that improves things.
It felt kind of like my first outing with my O1v. I was mostly comfortable, but not adept. Mentally I kept thinking through each step twice. Scenes were awesome to have, and made life considerably easier. I did miss having physical faders to adjust multiple channels simultaneously, that slowed me a little. Mixing with a touchpad is certainly not ideal. A wireless USB mouse would be handy. Adjusting some of the controls is a little twitchy, need to get used to the long fader available next to many of the display boxes, like on auxes.
Just some rambling thoughts there. Overall I'm very happy and I love having the power of SAC in a completely scalable system like this. With the laptop I can run around with 24 channels, big enough for probably 90% of my gigs.
To make it short, the mixer is a pain. No groups, no channel mutes, no gates so switching between band and conductor/MC involves pulling down all the faders and starting from scratch/memory each song. I've taken my O1v a time or two, but that's about an 80lb rack to lug about. This was my impetus for purchasing SAC so quickly. Laptop, M-Audio ProFire2626 and I've fully replaced their little mixer.
The sound was great, everything just kind of popped in the mix today. Having gates and compressors for all the channels was awesome. Having more than a low/mid/high eq section was gorgeous. No monitors to mix, setup some VCA's for the whole band and just the horn sections (brass, keys, bass and drums) perfect first outing for SAC. Ran on my Vista laptop at 4x64 with a few dropped buffers per minute, but not bad and nothing audible. I'm going to rebuild with XP Pro this week and see if that improves things.
It felt kind of like my first outing with my O1v. I was mostly comfortable, but not adept. Mentally I kept thinking through each step twice. Scenes were awesome to have, and made life considerably easier. I did miss having physical faders to adjust multiple channels simultaneously, that slowed me a little. Mixing with a touchpad is certainly not ideal. A wireless USB mouse would be handy. Adjusting some of the controls is a little twitchy, need to get used to the long fader available next to many of the display boxes, like on auxes.
Just some rambling thoughts there. Overall I'm very happy and I love having the power of SAC in a completely scalable system like this. With the laptop I can run around with 24 channels, big enough for probably 90% of my gigs.