My dad's supposed to help out with purchasing a mixer for my church youth group. Do you guys have any ideas of what would be good? Here's what I can tell you.
Our church was donated a fair sum of money for this and other things, but I feel it would be a waste to spend more than 2000 dollars on it.
I'm pretty sure we wouldn't need more than 16 inputs, as we have an electric drum set, and it would be pretty tough for a small church band like us to get even 14 channels, much less 16.
Soundcraft, and Mackie. Our resident sound guy recommended Soundcraft, but from what I've seen, that stuff is a bit excessive for what we really need. I checked around, and Mackie seems to have some decent stuff, but I'm not sure if they're reliable. Have you guys had any experience with these two brands?
If you guys could help me out with this, it would be great. If I don't have any good information to get a cheaper sound board, our sound man could cause us to lose a good sum of money over a needlessly complicated sound board.
Mixers
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king_arthur
- Niemöller
- Posts: 1761
- Joined: Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:56 am
- Instruments: guitar, vocals, bass, BIAB, keyboards (synth anything)
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JR:
Having been involved with the PA for our church band, here are a bunch of disorganized thoughts and questions...
Assuming the drums are premixed to stereo, 16 channels seems like enough to me, although keep in mind that on many small 16 channel mixers, you get 8 mono channels and 4 stereo pairs, so you really only have 12... will you also need to provide channels for pastor's mic, other non-band mics, CD player, DVD player, etc.? Is this just for the band or for all the sound needs for putting on a service? If you'll have people singing with pre-recorded trax, you'll need a stereo channel for that that you can feed back into the monitors (most "tape in" inputs on mixing boards can't be sent to the monitor, you have to use a channel).
On the other hand, having extra channels never hurts. And eventually, you'll be asked to put up a few extra microphones for the Vacation Bible School children to do a presentation in the service, but the band will still be playing...
Mackie or Soundcraft, no preference, but think about whether you'll have a mixer person who knows what to do with a console or a rotating set of people who don't know what all those knobs do... if it's the latter, think about how you can make it as idiot-proof as possible, 'cause otherwise, people will find a way to kill the monitors mid-service because they don't realize that some button has to be "down."
How few monitor mixes can you get away with? For our band, I just run the worship leader and his guitar through the monitors and that's what everybody gets so they can sing along with what he's doing. Something I did on our setup is to mount a rack-mount tuner on the soundboard, faced back at the band, and then use one monitor channel to run everybody who needs to tune into that one tuner - it at least means that everybody's tuning to the same standard (and at one point we had a keyboard that was at A-438 or something, and we could set the tuner to match the keyboard).
Are you hoping to record soundboard tapes of the band, and, if so, how many live amps are you going to have on the platform? Our WL has a big Behringer guitar amp that he faces right up at himself and cranks up so loud that we generally don't run any guitar through the mains at all, the keyboard has built in speakers, I play bass through an amp and the drums aren't mic'd at all. So what goes through the PA speakers for the room is no good at all for a soundboard recording, and if we wanted to do those, we'd need several extra channels for mics that could be sent to the recorder but not the room... stereo sound isn't really necessary out in the room, but it IS nice to have on the tape; back when more of our stuff ran through the board, we'd do a stereo mix, and then turn that back into mono at the power amp. (If I was asked to do a recording of the band music, I would just put up an X-Y pair at the soundboard and maybe mix in a little extra of the WL's vocals)
Charles
Having been involved with the PA for our church band, here are a bunch of disorganized thoughts and questions...
Assuming the drums are premixed to stereo, 16 channels seems like enough to me, although keep in mind that on many small 16 channel mixers, you get 8 mono channels and 4 stereo pairs, so you really only have 12... will you also need to provide channels for pastor's mic, other non-band mics, CD player, DVD player, etc.? Is this just for the band or for all the sound needs for putting on a service? If you'll have people singing with pre-recorded trax, you'll need a stereo channel for that that you can feed back into the monitors (most "tape in" inputs on mixing boards can't be sent to the monitor, you have to use a channel).
On the other hand, having extra channels never hurts. And eventually, you'll be asked to put up a few extra microphones for the Vacation Bible School children to do a presentation in the service, but the band will still be playing...
Mackie or Soundcraft, no preference, but think about whether you'll have a mixer person who knows what to do with a console or a rotating set of people who don't know what all those knobs do... if it's the latter, think about how you can make it as idiot-proof as possible, 'cause otherwise, people will find a way to kill the monitors mid-service because they don't realize that some button has to be "down."
How few monitor mixes can you get away with? For our band, I just run the worship leader and his guitar through the monitors and that's what everybody gets so they can sing along with what he's doing. Something I did on our setup is to mount a rack-mount tuner on the soundboard, faced back at the band, and then use one monitor channel to run everybody who needs to tune into that one tuner - it at least means that everybody's tuning to the same standard (and at one point we had a keyboard that was at A-438 or something, and we could set the tuner to match the keyboard).
Are you hoping to record soundboard tapes of the band, and, if so, how many live amps are you going to have on the platform? Our WL has a big Behringer guitar amp that he faces right up at himself and cranks up so loud that we generally don't run any guitar through the mains at all, the keyboard has built in speakers, I play bass through an amp and the drums aren't mic'd at all. So what goes through the PA speakers for the room is no good at all for a soundboard recording, and if we wanted to do those, we'd need several extra channels for mics that could be sent to the recorder but not the room... stereo sound isn't really necessary out in the room, but it IS nice to have on the tape; back when more of our stuff ran through the board, we'd do a stereo mix, and then turn that back into mono at the power amp. (If I was asked to do a recording of the band music, I would just put up an X-Y pair at the soundboard and maybe mix in a little extra of the WL's vocals)
Charles
"...one does not write in dactylic hexameter purely by accident..." - poetic designs
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Reist
- Roosevelt
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It's hard for me to know a lot of this information, as I'm just the bystanding kid trying to help the board make a good decision.
However, I know we do not hold full services with a pastor and what-not. Our leader usually just uses the singer's mics. We don't have any kids choirs using our stuff, since it's just a youth room. I'll try and get some more info to answer your questions.
However, I know we do not hold full services with a pastor and what-not. Our leader usually just uses the singer's mics. We don't have any kids choirs using our stuff, since it's just a youth room. I'll try and get some more info to answer your questions.
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Leaf
- Churchill
- Posts: 2438
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- Instruments: Drums, guitar, bass, vocals.
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- Location: Campbell River, B.C.
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Hey, I'm not an expert on mixers, I am not schooled in them, I don't' think I have the type of detailed ear for tone that a Puce or Des or the like have...but here is my experience:
In the past 13 years I've played at least 20 gigs a year, up to 100 doing covers in a variety of smaller venues. 80% of the time, we did our own sound. We used the Mackie 1604 alot at the beginning, then I started my own cover band scene with some buds and we used the older version of the Mackie 1604, which I still use to run our monitor system for rehearsals, to work as a preamp for tracking at the band's practice space, and on occasions still for gigs. I've rented and used a few modern Yamaha mixers, and used one of their four channel ones with the usb port... and I also own a behringer DDX3216 32 channel digital board.
The Mackie is VERY reliable...durable, and sounds great. The behringer product line is well known for it's habit of ripping off patented ideas in sometimes not so annoying ways like the mixers, and sometimes in blatant bullshit ways. Guess whose preamp and eq spectrum they choose to rip off for their mixers? I think that's a testament there too! Mind you, the Behringer is NOT durable, and really doesn't sound, running through my pa, much different, but I do prefer the tone of the Mackie, I prefer the flexibility and digital ease of the Behringer!
For affordable, middle of the road to high end gear, Mackie does a good job, their manuals are awesome for information and teaching you something, and ... it's good.
The Yamahas clearly sound different... there's something about the yamaha sound I find strangely appealing though. I'd like to work with some a bit more to get a feel for it.
The behringer was cheap... $1000 at the time for a board like that, it sounds ok... but reminds me of running cubase for some reason.
I have no idea if any of this helps ya...but if it was up to me, I 'd instantly buy a Mackie simply because I know I can trust it, it's durable, it sounds good-great, it's intuitive, easy to route, they are pretty good about making sure their boards have plenty of routing options... etc etc.
In the past 13 years I've played at least 20 gigs a year, up to 100 doing covers in a variety of smaller venues. 80% of the time, we did our own sound. We used the Mackie 1604 alot at the beginning, then I started my own cover band scene with some buds and we used the older version of the Mackie 1604, which I still use to run our monitor system for rehearsals, to work as a preamp for tracking at the band's practice space, and on occasions still for gigs. I've rented and used a few modern Yamaha mixers, and used one of their four channel ones with the usb port... and I also own a behringer DDX3216 32 channel digital board.
The Mackie is VERY reliable...durable, and sounds great. The behringer product line is well known for it's habit of ripping off patented ideas in sometimes not so annoying ways like the mixers, and sometimes in blatant bullshit ways. Guess whose preamp and eq spectrum they choose to rip off for their mixers? I think that's a testament there too! Mind you, the Behringer is NOT durable, and really doesn't sound, running through my pa, much different, but I do prefer the tone of the Mackie, I prefer the flexibility and digital ease of the Behringer!
For affordable, middle of the road to high end gear, Mackie does a good job, their manuals are awesome for information and teaching you something, and ... it's good.
The Yamahas clearly sound different... there's something about the yamaha sound I find strangely appealing though. I'd like to work with some a bit more to get a feel for it.
The behringer was cheap... $1000 at the time for a board like that, it sounds ok... but reminds me of running cubase for some reason.
I have no idea if any of this helps ya...but if it was up to me, I 'd instantly buy a Mackie simply because I know I can trust it, it's durable, it sounds good-great, it's intuitive, easy to route, they are pretty good about making sure their boards have plenty of routing options... etc etc.
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stateshirt
- de Gaulle
- Posts: 157
- Joined: Sat Sep 25, 2004 10:35 pm
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- Location: los fucking angeles
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I had a Mackie 1604 for a few years, mainly for recording. The mic preamps are good for the money. It never gave me any problems. The 1642 is $599 and the 1604 is $849, sounds like either of those might work. Mackie and Soundcraft are both good choices, they both still make quality gear. Honestly those would be the only two brands I would consider for that price range. 