Audio101

Quick Fixes

• Budget more speaker outdoors than you would for the same crowd inside.
• Get speakers up on stands, above head height. Bodies absorb sound.
• Windscreens on every microphone, every time. Wind noise ruins a recording you cannot redo.
• Cold drains batteries faster. Bring spares and keep them warm.
• Check the local noise ordinance and curfew before you build the timeline, not after.
• Have a rain plan for the gear, not just for the guests.

Quick Fixes

• Aim the cone at seats. A cone that lands on a wall, a ceiling or an empty aisle is sound you paid for and nobody heard.
• Stand where the cone is not. If the speakers are ahead of you and pointed away, you are in the dark part of the room -- and a mic in the dark cannot hear itself.
• Sides are fine. Plenty of rooms only have a spot for speakers along the side walls, and that works. Just turn each one so the edge of its cone sweeps past the mic instead of across it. A few degrees is the whole difference.
• Tilt speakers down toward the crowd. A cone aimed over their heads hits the back wall and comes back at you.
• In a long room, add a second pair of speakers partway back. That beats turning the front pair up. The second position is called a delay stack.
• It is called that because its sound has to be held back a split second. Sound takes about a second to travel 1,100 feet, so a stack 100 feet back needs roughly a tenth of a second of delay to land together with the front. Skip the delay and the people standing there hear the same word twice, which is worse than being too far from the speakers.
• That delay is set in a processor, or in the speaker itself. Most small mixers cannot do it at all. Two more speakers with no delay on them makes the back of the room worse than leaving them off. If your room needs a delay stack, that is the line where doing it yourself stops working -- hire us for that one.

Mic Types -- Pick the Right Tool

• Handheld -- singers and speeches. Hold it 4-6 inches from your mouth. Not at your chin.
• Lapel / Lav -- tiny capsule that clips to your shirt or collar. Best for presenters who move.
• Boundary -- flat mic that lays on a table or floor. Hears everything above the surface.
• Headset -- clips behind your ear. Stays the same distance from your mouth no matter how you move.
• Dynamic or condenser. A dynamic mic needs nothing but a cable -- almost every handheld you have held is one. A condenser is more sensitive and picks up more detail, and it needs power sent up the cable to work. That is phantom power, a button on the mixer marked 48V or +48. Lavs, headsets, boundary mics and most nice vocal mics are condensers. No 48V, no sound -- and nothing on the mixer looks broken.
• With any of them, closer is not just louder. It is boomier too. Right on top of a directional mic the low end swells up, which is why someone who eats the mic sounds muddy instead of clear.

Which Way A Mic Listens

• Directional -- hears what it is pointed at and mostly ignores what is behind it. The pro word is cardioid. This is what you want for live sound, because you can point its deaf end at a speaker.
• Omni -- hears the same in every direction. Easy to place, and it hears your speakers just as well as it hears you, so it feeds back sooner in a loud room.
• Supercardioid -- a tighter version of directional, but it hears a little bit directly behind itself. Worth knowing, because it changes where you put the floor monitor -- see Why The Band Cannot Hear.

Top To Bottom

• Gain (sometimes called trim). The first knob. It sets how loud the mic comes into the board. Set it at sound check and then leave it alone.
• Low cut. A little button, often marked with a curve. It throws away the deep rumble under a voice. Nobody needs that rumble. Leave it switched on for every microphone -- the only things you leave it off are a kick drum and a bass.
• EQ. Three knobs: low, mid, high. Turn one down if it sounds wrong. Turning things up is what gets you in trouble.
• Aux (also marked Monitor or Send). This knob feeds the speaker on the floor facing the band, separately from what the room hears. Nothing to do with the 3.5mm aux cable out of your phone. Same three letters, different thing.
• Pan. Puts the channel to the left or the right. Leave every voice in the middle.
• Mute. Turns the channel off. When someone is not coming through, look here first.
• Fader. The slider at the bottom. This is how loud the room hears it, and this is the only one you should be moving during the event.
• Every strip is the same. Once you can read one, you can read a board with thirty two of them.
• One more fader is not on any strip. Off to the right there is a master fader, and everything from every channel passes through it on the way out. If the master is down, nothing you do on a channel will be heard. It is the second thing to check when there is no sound, right after mute.

Sound Check Order

• Check every cable is pushed all the way in, at both ends.
• Power up in order: mixer and sources first, powered speakers last. Shut down in reverse -- speakers off first. That order is what keeps the thump out of the PA.
• Test each mic one at a time.
• Set gain on the loudest thing that person will do. Watch the red light on that channel. It is the clip light, and it flashes when the signal is too hot and about to turn fuzzy. If it flashes on their loudest word, back the gain off until it stops.
• EQ the room while that mic is still open. Bring it up slowly until it just starts to ring, then pull down the EQ band that is ringing until the ring stops. Do it for every mic, one at a time, standing where that person will actually stand.
• That is called ringing out the room, and it is where your extra volume comes from. A system rung out will go noticeably louder before it howls than the same system straight out of the case.
• Set monitor mix so performers can hear themselves.
• Walk the room to check coverage.
• Save your settings if you have a digital mixer.

Quick Fixes

• Move the mic away from the speakers.
• Turn down the channel fader a little.
• Turn the speaker so its cone lands on people, not across the mic. Where Do The Speakers Go has the picture.
• Get the mic out of the cone. In front of a speaker is where feedback lives; just outside the edge of the cone is where it stops.
• Always sound check before guests arrive.

The 6 Step Checklist

• Is it powered on? (Check every device in the chain.)
• Is it muted? (Channel mute button and master mute.)
• Are the faders up? (Channel fader AND master.)
• Is the cable connected? (Both ends.)
• Is the correct input selected? (Right channel, right input.)
• Is the speaker's own volume up? (A powered speaker has its own knob on the back, and it is easy to leave at zero.)
• Is phantom power on? (A condenser mic -- a lav, a headset, a boundary mic -- is silent without 48V. See Which Mic Is Which.)
• Is the gain / trim up? (First knob on the channel strip.)

Quick Fixes

• At SwissMixx we mic all three — the officiant and both partners. Done right it is the best the ceremony can sound, but three open mics that close together fight each other and the vows go thin.
• Doing it yourself? Use one handheld on a stand between the three of them. It is the safest choice and the least likely to feed back.
• Give readers their own mic on a short stand, so nobody is handed one mid-sentence.
• A speaker does not spray sound in every direction. It throws a cone out the front, like the beam of a flashlight -- narrow at the box, wide by the time it reaches the back row. Inside the cone is loud. Just past the edge is much quieter. How wide that cone opens has a name: the splay. A spec sheet, or a rental rep, will call it the coverage instead -- written like 90 x 60. (Where Do The Speakers Go has more on this.)
• Point the cone at people. Keep it off the microphones. That matters more than where the speaker is standing. Get that right and the boxes can go almost anywhere.
• Draw an imaginary circle a few feet around the microphone and aim the inside edge of the cone past it. Twenty degrees is often the whole difference between a clean ceremony and a squeal.
• One each side out front is the easy version, because both cones naturally point away from the couple. But a speaker can sit off to one side, or even behind you, as long as it is turned so its cone lands on seats and not on the mic.
• Speakers off to one side feed back sooner, and the microphone you pick decides how much. A clip-on lav hears in every direction, so it hears those speakers too. A handheld only hears what it is pointed at. With the speakers to one side, use the handheld and keep its back end turned toward them.
• Outdoors, a windscreen is not optional. Wind across any mic sounds like a hurricane on the recording.
• Rehearse at the actual spot, at the actual time of day. Afternoon sun and evening wind are different problems.
• Put one person in charge of the processional and recessional cues.

Communication Tips

• Ask for "more" or "less" of one thing by name. "Louder" does not say louder than what, so it usually gets you nothing.
• Say what you hear, not what you think the fix is.
• Do a sound check together before guests arrive.
• Have one person communicate -- not five people at once.
• Ask "what do you need from me?" before the event starts.