Whoot..... Just talked to the tour manager.... No snake but got full run of the house. 4 mics on stage plus a SBD feed to the iRiver. Was even invited to dinner after the sound check. :-}
So now the question.... Is it better to run the mod460s or the 480s with the cards in the middle and the others with the omnis on the outside?
Just FYI re: access to the house's snake.
No tour manager will tell you house snake access is OK without clearing it with the engineer on the spot the day of the show, so tour managers will typically either say "no" or "we'll see at the show." It is generally difficult to know how many channels the engineer will have available ahead of time, which is compounded by multiple acts with overlapping set-ups. I would not rule out access to the house snake, however, until you get there and ask the engineer. If you are showing up "with the band" and have full permissions, the engineer should be as cooperative as professionalism requires in his opinion (we know how this goes with some sound guys
).
If he/she is cool and there are two open channels, you should have no problem running your stage mics through the house's snake. If you want to make the engineer even more comfortable with the idea if he/she seems reluctant, ask to directly patch from the snake output lines on the 2 channels you would be using (prob. will be XLR males that plug into the direct inputs on the SBD) with your own cables. Or, ask to take the direct out feeds from those two channels, but then make sure to be on the same page as to who is powering the mics before plugging things in to your R4 and leave the phantom power switches to off when you power up.
With 4 mics on stage, your set up should be flexible based on the bands' set-up and may need to change for different bands with different stage plots. Also thanks to Mikey's (terrapinj) JW mod 460s, I ran a 6 channel a couple weeks ago. 2 channels from the SBD, a cardioid pair in the center, and 2 additional cardioids as spot mics to fatten the sound of what I expected to come out distant on the center pair. I used the JW mod 461s DINa on the stage lip with the drums centered and my 451s as spot mics w/ one on the keys amps and one on the guitar amp. I knew the set-up and relative stage volumes ahead of time which helped me plan my set up.
In your case, you will want to decide when you see the stage set-up how best to run. 4 cardioids may be better, depending on the situation. Although the growing fetish on this site for split omnis has merit sonically in many cases, it is a technique that has a lot more pitfalls when it comes to stage taping. Omnis pick up a lot of things besides more crowd noise that cardioids will reject, like the click of a guitarist's foot pedal or stage banter
during songs and not just between.
Topic: Split Omnis Vs. DINa Cards (or hypers) on stage (Read 5966 times)