Direct box instead of micing the amp to PA

[Carl Mesrobian]

Len..Group that I am currently working with insists on no amps onstage (result of dealing with one too many overzealous lead guitarists!). ...

Finally another way to quiet down guitar players - the other way being charts.

I have a Radial Tonebone PZ Pre for acoustic, and never though of trying pedal steel through it. I'll have to try that.

[Jim Pitman]

A lot of this comes down to "can you afford a sound man". Most gigs I play we cannot. Furthermore can you trust his judgment. In small venues, I've heard some pretty amazing seasoned musicians self mix using the conventional un-miced instrument amps and FOH with vocals only.

[b0b]

A lot of this comes down to "can you afford a sound man". Most gigs I play we cannot. Furthermore can you trust his judgment. In small venues, I've heard some pretty amazing seasoned musicians self mix using the conventional un-miced instrument amps and FOH with vocals only.

I often played a local honky tonk in the '80s that way. Now it has an in-house system and they mic everything - and it sounds worse! Much worse.

[Gary Dillard]

I still prefer an amp with speakers but with most of the money gigs using in ears a full amp is not needed.

They're really going overboard with the in ear monitors these days. I saw a guy singing on SNL with just two musicians, piano and violin. He was standing in between them and all 3 had those gadgets in their ears. I mean, voice and two acoustic instruments - WHY?

Marty Robbins and Jerry Byrd didn't need no stinkin' monitors.

Thats good preaching BoB. Agree!

[Tim Harr]

Len..Group that I am currently working with insists on no amps onstage (result of dealing with one too many overzealous lead guitarists!). ...

Finally another way to quiet down guitar players - the other way being charts.

I have a Radial Tonebone PZ Pre for acoustic, and never though of trying pedal steel through it. I'll have to try that.

Charts? quiet down guitar players? That's a pretty snarky thing to say... perhaps in your world that's the case.

[Dave Mudgett]

Finally another way to quiet down guitar players - the other way being charts. ...

Charts? quiet down guitar players? That's a pretty snarky thing to say... perhaps in your world that's the case.

Ha, that goes to the old joke, "Q: How do you get a guitar player to turn down? A: Put a chart in front of him." Like all humor, it wouldn't be funny if there wasn't a grain of truth in it, but I think it's overdone. But I'll say I do get some resistance from some (in my case, thankfully not most) guitar players to me putting a chart in front of me (us), which I always prefer to do when I (we) don't know the material. I would much rather read from a chart than screw things up, even if some people think it looks weird to be reading from a chart onstage. It's gotten better since I have all my charts on a Samsung Galaxy Tablet on a neat little holder that attaches directly to right rear leg of my steel or a mic stand.

I missed this thread at the time - I was between hospital visits, that stuff got fixed, OK now. But I definitely much, much prefer to have backline amps - much preferably my own - in fact, my whole signal chain.

But I do gigs where that is impossible - tiny micro-brews, coffee houses, guitar behind a piano bar - where there just isn't room or they are paranoid about 'loud guitar players'. For clean (i.e., linear amplification) guitar or pedal steel, I think it can be made to work well. The direct out on my Quilter Tone Block (201, but I'm sure they all work fine) sounds very good, and I'm sure lots of amps have good direct outs now.

I think one key to making this work, besides good-sounding effects or modeler - is a good speaker emulator. Some amps like the Quilter have them. And for using just my pedalboard, I have used a couple of different speaker emulators based on convolution of the input with a speaker cab's impulse response. That stuff has really taken off the last few years, and there are pedals in the sub-$100 range that do a tolerable job of modeling the speaker cabinets of common guitar amps. IR convolution can't get nonlinear effects - it is based on theory of linear time-invariant systems. But it is possible to do a reasonable job of modeling the coupling of the speaker output with the acoustics of the cabinet.

But I have not yet found anything that really satisfies me for nonlinear issues like getting a good pushed-tube-amp sound, nonlinear speaker responses, and so on, especially for guitar. It always sounds buzzy to me. Some of the newer and more pricey modelers may be better at this, but I am not motivated to drop thousands and spend days and weeks tweaking to find out. Micing a small tube amp makes more sense to me, I have a bunch of really good sounding ones that can be pushed without blistering the ears. I guess I also don't see much point to trying to put Muddy, BB, Albert, Freddie, Magic Sam, Clapton, Beck, SRV, or Van Halen in a box for in-ears. That kind of music is as much felt as heard. For me, anyway.

[Dave Hopping]

I've always set my own tone, fx, etc, miced the amp and had the sound guy mix it flat. For much of that time the board was on the stage with the lead singer/bandleader occasionally tweaking a knob.The band played quietly enough we could all hear ourselves and balance the stage mix on the fly.

Worked fine.

[Dave Grafe]

Acoustic players and bass players use a direct box to the PA instead of micing an amp. Wonder how a direct box would respond if you placed it after your effects pedals to input of the direct box, then direct box XLR to PA input of the mixer/amp .Then the 1/4 inch output of the direct box to your amp.

Thoughts?

1) Acoustic guitars are best served by direct lines in a live performance setting due to signal interference from stage sound, including potential feedback from monitors, and the inability to maintain a consistent microphone location relative to the instrument and thus a consistent sound. In the recording studio a superior signal can be obtained with one or more high-quality condenser mics that would not be feasible on stage.

2) Acoustic basses have all of these issues, but on steroids due to low frequencies and instrument resonances involved. Electric basses are most commonly taken direct whenever possible because very few microphones have the low frequency response and high SPL capability for this purpose, the Beyer M88 being the notable exception.

3) Electric guitars, which includes steel guitars, derive a significant part of their tone from the amplifier they are played through, and a number of functional mics have been specifically produced for this task.

The advent of IEM sysyems and the concurrent movement towards silent stages in service of minimizing noise in the vocal and horn mics is steering this conversation, but the physics involved remain the same, and successful implementation of an all-line-input scheme by definition requires the constant attention of an audio mixer with exceptional skill to make it happen. Real qualified audio folk of any sort are rare and do not work cheap, and unless one is working the major markets a mix engineer who can keep a full IEM system sounding as good or better than a stage with conventional gear and floor wedges is probably already working somewhere else.

Having spent over 45 years mixing top artists this is a no brainer, but perhaps news to those not so familiar with real life in the trenches.

[Bryce Van Parys]

I've been doing a lot of experimenting here on stage. Since I have to haul the PA, 2 guitars and the steel, I've tried my best to eliminate the amp with limited success. The digitech Amp modeler in my Souncraft UI24 does sound pretty good, but it is more flat and doesn't take the pedals near as well as the cabinet. So I still prefer a Sennhauser 609e in front of the cab. To keep the volume at a reasonable level on stage, and still be able to hear myself over the band, I've taken to an in ear monitor in one ear only, that I can mix myself. That REALLY helps me hear, tune and balance without blasting the band or FOH

As a pro bassist for 30 years (double bass and electric), I can say we struggle with DI and FOH a lot. Most DI outputs will have a pre or post eq option. So you can send your effected/affected sound to the house if you prefer. So, run your pedals to the amp, dial in the tone, then send the signal post fx to the board.

[Fred Treece]

Acoustic players and bass players use a direct box to the PA instead of micing an amp. Wonder how a direct box would respond if you placed it after your effects pedals to input of the direct box, then direct box XLR to PA input of the mixer/amp .Then the 1/4 inch output of the direct box to your amp.

Thoughts?

That is a common use of a DI box when there is no line out on the amp, and it should respond very well. The signals being sent will be very close to the same. The way the two signals get amplified and how they ultimately sound is obviously going to be different.

It would help if there was a preamp between the DI and the PA, to tighten up the guitar tone a bit before it hits the board. It sounds like the guitar amp input is getting hit with all your effects (no fx loop) anyway, so putting the DI before the preamp should get a similar result.