Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
I took the new rig out to a gig and used it this evening. A band that I worked with for years was doing a reunion gig at a venue they used to play. I ran the show on the SAC rig.
The management was frightened by my 'little' pa. They talked to the band and they talked to me. The owner told me that this wasn't an arena show and I didn't need all that pa (single stack of JBL SR series cabs per side - he may have had a stroke if I had rolled in about 5' of analog desk plus a processing rack). At the end of the night they told the band that the volume was perfect.
The owner of the home studio where the singer records was there and was impressed with the sound. A local Karaoke operator told me it sounded great. Several other people had favorable comments (and the crowd went wild).
I am painfully slow because I don't know my way around the software yet. I also had the handicap of mixing from directly behind one of the stacks (its a small venue). A remote on a laptop would have been a beautiful thing!
The rig ran without a glitch (I can't really say the same for me). I had 12 channels and three monitor mixes. By the end of the show I had enough processing going on to occasionally bump 8% load. There were no slipped buffers any time that I checked. I ran it at 2X64.
We will do it all again tomorrow evening and then next week I plan on taking it to a church convention that I am working. I needed to do this one so that I will be ready for the next one (you can't answer a question if you don't know what the question is, or even that there is a question to be asked). It was an interesting (read learning) experience.
The baby system is a pair of SR Series stacks 2X12 with 2" over double 18" bottoms powered by 2 Crown I-Tech 4000's and a QSC PLX-1602 for the horns (side fills for some shows). I used a drive rack PA for a system controller and drove it from the SAC output. Monitors were 3 Eons each on a separate mix (the singer doesn't want no stinking monitors in the way). The band is a four piece R&R band G,B,&D with a front man. Six mikes on the four piece drum kit, base out, guitar mike, guitar di for the unused acoustic, and four vocal mikes.
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
Good job... now its time to sit back... read the manual... then practice navigating around the interface so the next time you feel very comfortable. :)
Bob L
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
welcome fully to the family WinkOr ;)
the next step happens when you get twitchy behind your other conventional systems 'cuz you don't have a mouse anywhere...usually coincides with thinking "damn i could fix that (___) so easily if I was on the SAC rig..."
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
I am a little unclear as to why you titled this thread the way you did. It sounds like you're either really unsure you are doing the right thing, or are doing so unwillingly.
Yet, you've built from the ground up a very capable machine, you've done a show with no glitches, very low latencies, and gotten very positive compliments on the sound. And, as you said, you didn't have to haul around a 5' console and outboard rack.
So why the hesitancy? Sounds like you're doing everything right to me!
Regards,
Ira
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
Ira,
The SAC rig was definitely right! It has now run live for six hours with a band on stage with no glitches and 0 slipped buffers. I added an additional 13 outs last night for a recording and still saw only 10% load.
I had only gotten the machine together earlier this week and had some issues that needed to be resolved. I was seeing a slipped output buffer per second when I first brought the machine up. I had a show on Thursday, so it was Friday afternoon before the machine was running stable. The only audio that had been run through it was a CD and one vocal mike before I took it to the gig.
While the machine and the software performed flawlessly through out the shows, I was not well prepared to use the machine. I had downloaded the demo and read the manual and played around with things a bit, but I had to think about every step and how to do what needed to be done. Analog has been my world. I have never even mixed on a digital console. With my old analog hardware I will have a decent mix half way through the first song without a sound check in most cases. With the new environment it was more like half way through the first set.
As I said in my first post, you can't look for an answer to a question before you know that there is a question. I needed this first gig to know what the questions are. There has to be a 'first' gig sometime, but I would have liked to be a bit more prepared than I was. The next gig will be a lot smoother and I will be much more prepared, thanks to this first experience.
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
I wrote this up as an article and posted it to one of my websites HERE.
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
after you'v done a few shows you'l have
"start scenes" that will let you have generic
mixes _before_ the first song starts
oh...
and get use to people telling you it sounds good
fwiw
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
I spent around 15 hours over the past three days mixing on SAC. I worked a church convention with 9 vocal mikes and 16 band inputs plus stereo CD playback. I used 5 monitor mixes for the event. The rig performed flawlessly. I did get it up around 35% load with eq, dynamics, and some effects.
I am beginning to find my way around without much hesitation. I had a starter mix session when I went into this one, so things were pretty smooth.
The convention was held in a hotel ballroom. The room is fairly nasty with a lot of reflections, a hard surfaced box with decorative ceiling. Not the worst room I have worked, but far from the best. The mix location was closer to the band than the stacks. I am looking forward to a gig where I can actually hear the stacks. Maybe next weekend.
To date no one has seemed the least concerned about the lack of a hardware console. Most people seem to think that mixing on a computer is only natural in this day and age.
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
There was a benefit for a local musician this weekend. I took the SAC rig down and mixed the main stage, 9 bands in 10 hours. I wrote up the story on my blog. If anyone is interested you can find it at: http://www.audioartsound.com/blogs/
Re: Right or Wrong, I am now officially a SAC user
Good stuff WinkOr - thanks for the update.
cheers
mako