A change in venue gear where I play means I need to make a modification to my sound across all songs. I play in a worship band in a small church, with a hall which is only about 20 - 25 feet square. They have recently invested in new tech including an A & H SQ5 desk with new amps and a sub-woofer.
however the guy on the PA has a tendency to tweak and twiddle, and all of a sudden the bass gets turned down or goes altogether. The band consists of piano, guitar, two vocalists and myself on keys. And because there is no bass player, I cover that with vsts on the keyboard, so bass is important. Asking for more bass during practice or actual worship doesn’t go down well, so i have taken to putting an EQ bass boost on all songs, so the pa guy thinks he has turned it down, but actually hasn’t!
At the moment i am having to add the EQ for every song and every state. I have created a linked rack to make things a little easier, but it seem unnecessarily laborious. I have looked at putting the linked rack into the background rack, but there isn’t an audio input available for the background rack. It might be possible to add an audio port to the background rack, but I don’t know how - I am not up to much speed re programming stuff. Am I in the right direction, or is there another way of adding the bass boost EQ across the board?
I’m in 2 bands and while we try to use the same Audio Engineers, it’s not always possible. I’ve run into similar issues and decided to take control of my tone and my IEM mix, so a while ago I add some linked racks for that purpose. I believe Torsten, Corky and others did this long before I did. The background rack seems like the easiest path, but from what I’ve gathered from Brad in older posts the BG rack adds significant latency. I don’t recall seeing any definitive numbers on how much, but I do recall he said for audio processing it’s not a great idea.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a better way so I did essentially the same as you. I added a “Master” Rack with EQ and compression if I need it (or whatever EFX I need to add), for my guitar, and another Master rack with EFX for my sax and horns, and inserted them into every song. I routed each to the PA and also to my Monitor outputs which goes to my Sennheiser wireless IEM (with EQ and compression plugins for IEM. While I was at it I added an IEM rack with the same EFX, feeding the band from the board to my Monitor outputs to my IEM. So now my IEM mix has the band thru a rack with EFX, and myself thru the Master racks with EFX.
So now I have far more control over my own IEM mix, and a degree of control over the PA. I’ve found it to be worth the effort… I started using a touch of compression to smooth out PA levels using better compression plugins than typical PA and with finer control, and I can walk out front and do my own EQ during soundcheck and tell the AE to keep me flat unless it really needs it. But the IEM rack is even more helpful; sometimes I’m so close to the subs that rolling off the low end for IEM really helps, and if my own instruments need some volume adjustment in my IEM I have 2 buttons on my footpedal to raise/lower volume, hands-free. Sorry I don’t have an easier solution, but hope that helps.
Tom
Like others have mentioned, for one of my projects i have a global linked output rack which is used in every song. (The rack sends its outputs internally to global audio ports, which saves having to route that in the song.) For my one-man-band project, what i do is send the bass vst’s to a separate logical audio port, and bind a controller on my keyboard to the Master Output Level of that port. That way i can adjust the output level of my left-hand bass separately from the rest of my vst’s.
Thanks, twaw. What you said from Brad about the background rack adding latency takes that option out of the equation. I have created a rack with an EQ and a limiter, both from Fabfilter. They do actually do add a small amount of latency, but not so much as to worry. it would be noticeable if I were recording, but then I woudn’t need the rack because I wouldn’t be fighting the pa guy!
So it looks like continuing with the long slog of adding it to every song and every state. Ho Hum!
That looks like a great option, Jimbo, but I have n o idea how to go about setting up global ports. I am still only using the left and right ports that appeared when I first st Cantabile up all those years ago - I didn’t get into this level of music tech until I was alreasy in my 60’s after nearly 30 years away, so getting up to speed is rather a big job!
I’m guessing a bit here but I think what Jimbokeys said about global audio ports is essentially the same thing as what I did. If so, here’s a pic. Sorry if you already know some of this and I’m over explaining! Create the rack and add a plugin like EQ. Here’s what you see when you click the plugin itself:
So my Master Output rack doesn’t need a route in the song, because I did that within the rack (Add Route is blank).
The MEqualizer is already routed WITHIN THE RACK to my PA GUITAR OUT (which is my audio port initially created in Cantabile for going to the PA. Like your L and R. I have 8 outs on my interface so I need to be clear what goes where).
Since I want this rack to be global and only manually changed, and not be affected by anything in each song, for the plugin I only check Entire Bank on the right side (which means only Rack State changes will be saved, song saves won’t affect it.) If you check the left side then changes you make to this rack in a song and save the song, those song changes will override your Rack State, but only for that song. Not what you want for a global rack.
And just as important, click on the rack itself and only check Selected Rack State. Don’t check Exported State.
This means I can have different Rack States, like “EQ to PA only” or “Flat - No EQ to PA”. I can then select a Rack state and it stays the same across all songs. Until I manually change it.
Thanks, Jimbo. I will print those pictures out and see if I can get my head round it, then give it a go! Tonight is too close to tomorrow’s worship session.
