Audio Recording

One of the most enjoyable musical experiences are watching live concerts. Often, great sound engineers hired by great artists are able to produce the best sound as possible when performing live in any concert venues. This is not a problem. However, you might encounter live performances which sounds dull and muddy. This is often associated with garage band like concerts or simply playing live band in your garage, home studios, friends party lounge, etc.

Below is the most common setup found in most indie garage live concert or home party live band setups. It is because this is the most affordable setup with no expensive mixers required.

However, by carefully crafting the sound, the band can produce a great sounding live performances.

As you have noticed, there is no mixer used in the setup. To get the best sound out of this setup, the following are recommended:

1.) Most of the guitar amps have low, mid and high EQ settings. Low corresponds to the bass frequency ranges, mid for medium frequency and high for treble frequencies.

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a.) To avoid guitar sound to conflict with the bass frequencies (where kick drums and bass guitars dominate) , turn the low(bass) setting to around 2 or 3 (assuming 10 is the loudest in the knob). Setting this to 0 (minimum) is not recommended as it removes the entire guitar bass frequencies which does not sound nice. Feel free to experiment; start with a setting of 3. If your guitar amp does not have 1 to 10 units, you can estimate it by turning the knob between the minimum and the average.

b.) Next, the guitar sound tends to bury the vocals especially if the guitar is using overdrive or heavy in strumming sound. To make the vocals as clear as possible, you need to turn the MID eq knob of your guitar amplifier to around 3 to 4.

c.) Set the treble (high) section to around 5.

2.) For setting bass amplifers, to compensate the loss of guitar bass frequencies you need to beef up the bass guitar amplifers to make the live performance as heavy as possible. Most bass amps like guitars also have EQ knobs (Bass, Mid and Treble). Set the bass knob to around 7 or 8.

The mid in bass guitar is not so important unless you are doing bass solo targeting higher bass notes. You can trim down the mid knob to around 3 to 5 to give way for the vocals.

The treble section can be set to 5.

3.) Finally the vocals, assuming the vocal amps also have some kind of EQ function (low , mid and high). Set the following:

Low(bass) – 3 or 4
Mid – 7 or 8
High – 6 or 7

Set the echo or reverb setting to minimum. Do not overdo as, extreme reverberation or echo can make the lyrics unclear. Put as little as reverb to make the vocal performance sounds fuller without getting drowned.

4.) How about the drums? Drums do not have EQ settings in live mixing. Unless you are miking each one of the drum components which is often not done (unlike when you are recording tracks in the studio, the drums needs to be miked).

The above suggestions will work best for small, garage band like concerts and home party concerts. For big concerts like in the stadium or complex, the drum needs to be miked and all music instruments will need to be routed to a mixer where the engineer can make adjustments similar to the one discussed above. The mixer output is then feed to power amplifer/monitors to generate as loud sound as possible.