A couple of weeks ago I was leading the band for our church's Summer Club. We have 350+ children attend, so it's pretty big(!) and we have some great guys who come and play in the band. However, because we set up a stage for the band at the side of our normal stage, we have to run the sound slightly differently. I have led the band for three years now and we've done something different each year! This year was no exception, given my new toy (well, OK it's a bit more than a toy!).
The band consisted of:
Lead vocals
Guitar with acoustic and electric sounds on 2 channels
Electric guitar 2
Keyboards
Electronic Drum Kit
For a couple of reasons I decided to use the 828 as a mini-mixer for our band. Given the available inputs I ran the vocals in one mic input and put a mic on the second electric guitar amp. For the first guitar (mine) with both acoustic and electric outputs I ran them both into line inputs. I have a "Record out" output on my electric amp that isn't great, but was sufficient for summer club purposes. The keyboard was connected in stereo to two further inputs, as were the drums. I also had an auxiliary feed from the main church mixer which sent me some ambient microphone signal and radio mics from the guys who were on stage.
For outputs, I sent a basic stereo mix to the main church mixer, this was all the instruments at roughly the same level (with minor adjustments made through the week), but with my lead vocal boosted above them. I also had a stereo mix for my headphones, which I took directly from the 828 headphones out, a stereo mix for the drummer's headphones, which went to my Behringer headphone amp, and mono feeds for the second guitarist and the keyboard players foldback wedges.
In addition to the live instruments I was running Ableton Live for a couple of reasons. I had some music to play at various points and then, later in the week, we ran a metronome for one of the songs and even recorded our live playing a few times for this one song. Also, for this same song, I had some sound effects to play during the song, which I triggered with a MIDI foot controller. That was an interesting experience! Finally, one time we were without our keyboard player, so we used our recorded version of him playing, along with the metronome to keep us in time. This was brilliant. It was so great to have such a versatile setup and bit of kit.
So, the point of this post is to explain how I set up Ableton Live to add the pre-recorded material to the outputs. Within Live's Audio setting I enabled all the outputs mentioned above so I could output audio from Live to them. I then set up my sound effects etc to output to the Main L+R Outputs in Live (i.e. the default). I then selected the correct audio output pair to output the audio to the main L+R output on the 828. From memory, I think this may have been output 9 + 10, but that's a guess until I can check. Then I created a separate Audio track for each output that wasn't the main L+R and in the Audio From drop down selected Master. Then in the Audio To drop down I selected the appropriate output, so one for my foldback, one for the drummers, one for the keyboard players and one for the second electric guitar players. Then the faders within Live are used to blend the output sound with the already mixed sound of the Live instruments. It works really well. It's not quite as easy to mix this way as if you could mix this audio in CueMix, but it works well enough. I'm relieved.
I may update this post with some further detail from the week's setup later...
Add new comment