My XL Sounded Really Bad through a PA Today, Thats a New Experience!

Anthony76

Inspired
Hey guys my xl sounded nasty today, it is dialed in for guitar cabs on stage, and also sending with sims to FOH and sounds good. Through todays Pa it sounded harsh, trebly and scratchy. PA was an average vocal pA, but stage size meant no cabs, powered yamaha mixer sending to two ymaha 15" tops. Could not pull a usable tone at all, which has never happened before, and feedback city on high gain patches. This isnt a rip on the xl, more if anyone else has had this happen and if there are any thoughts.

Cheers
Anthony
 
This has happened to me before. It was obvious that a shitty quality PA was the cause. Unlike your situation, we had amps on the stage and decided to run vocals only through the PA. There are some benefits to small venue gigs. However, in your case, I really feel for you man…that must have SUCKED!
 
Yeah exactly, the yamaha 15" was different, normally through 12's. These presets that I dialed in for FOH where done through JBL eon 12" powered speakers at home but at volume, straight in from the XL xlr outs no mixer. Presets still sounded fine through these and some others when I got home and tested, but awful through the "15 FOH. The FOH mixer was very basic a Yamaha box mixer emx512 or something from memory (its what ws there and has to be used), only has a channel level, teb, mid, bass, effect and monitor send with a useless 7-band graphic. Normally run through a DB tech system with dual 12's and subs with varying degrees of foldback, but I usually run cabs on stage given there is usually enough room/plenty. But now I've got this once a week gig through the small vocal pa, I could use just one 1x12 for on stage but will still need to run to the pa. Maybe I should bring home a similar system and dial in some presets just for that PA? Or add a PEQ at the emnd of the Cab sim line?
 
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Anthony, do you use the same soundman every gig? Some soundmen are great and some are terrible. If the sound man eqs the PA with the mids all scooped and the lows and highs boosted, your perfectly dialed in sounds at home could be ruined. Drastic EQ on the PA to eliminate vocal feedback can also cause your perfectly dialed in sounds to not sound right also.
 
I feel your pain, we cycle our sound guys on a weekly rota, sometimes we end up with a sound guy who has no idea and tries some fancy tricks which sound horrible. I run direct to FOH and use IEMs on a separate mix (which is flat) so I have no idea what the people out front are hearing; so I just carry on playing thinking it all sounds good, and then get comments afterwards saying the guitar sounded really bad.....

I'd use the same patch and same PA with a different sound guy and it would sound amazing (well, as close to what I was aiming for as possible).

I'm not bashing sound guys, just saying it does also come down to who is controlling the PA and the quality of it etc.
 
The good presets are the ones that sound good on all audio systems. When they don't do there's potential left to make them better.
 
...I can listen to ACDC, U2 or Pink Floyd via little laptop speakers, in the car, on a monitor, in the living room or over a big PA system, no matter where, I've never heard a guitar that changed from good to nasty depending on the audio system.
Saying so, it's been my target to have my presets sound good everywhere.
 
dialing in on eons = problem #1

I play a club that has those Yamaha carpeted 15's as monitors and my patches sound fine.
You should try to dial you FOH tone on a better reference monitor. IMHO
 
Unfortunately, we are all only as good as the sound man we have mixing us on every given day. They can take our best performance and make it average, and take our worst performance and make it work. How many times have I come off stage on cloud 9 only to get no feedback from people whatsoever? Or come off stage thinking it was the worst gig ever and having people raving over it? And thats just the sound man! How bout the ears of those who came to the show? One person says it's the best tone they ever heard, the next says they couldn't hear me at all. Unfortunately it's all subjective. But we, the AXE-FX owners of the world know, that we did our part to bring killer tone to the room, regardless of how its mixed or perceived by others! :eagerness:

Sorry, I know you probably wanted some technical feedback, but just my 2 cents. I could easily get into PA speakers, mixing boards, outboard gear, EQs or lack there of, the ears of the sound man, the brain of the sound man or lack there of etc, etc, etc. Unfortunately its a freakin' crapshoot sometimes:shock
 
Dialing in on anything real should be possible. The key is to know what the speakers you are listening on sound like. For example, Yamaha NS10's - pretty much an industry standard studio monitor (or were for a very long time) - I think they sound like garbage in comparison to most other studio monitors I've used. But if you listen to something you are accustomed to on them to get used to how they sound, then you can dial in your ears for how they sound and make adjustments to your mix based on that (from a mixing standpoint).

One of my common things for studio or live is to listen to something I am very familiar with on the system to start to draw a baseline. From their I adjust the system, or adjust my expectations. For me that is generally the Aenima record or something that I have been listening to for many years and like the tones of. Then I can compare my tones to what I just heard that record sound like and know what adjustments are needed.

Even if you have a perfect FRFR and dial in at gig levels, it will sound bad on some PA's and good on the other, you can't over come that with any amount of dialing in, you just have to shoot for the middle ground. What you can do is listen to a lot of reference material and dial on your monitors and dial in something close to that at same volume. That will give you your best shot.

HTH

Kevin
 
Whether you're running direct to FOH or using a real cab/mic, you're at the mercy of the sound guy and the quality of the PA. Best you can do is dial well balanced patches that work on a decent system with a decent sound guy.

I've thought about the fact that good studio recordings sound good even through cheap speakers, but I think it's because the entire mix, which has been carefully crafted in a studio, is coming through the same speakers, so everything is still balanced and sounds good anyway. In a live situation, it's not nearly that well controlled, at least in my experience. You've got sound coming off the stage, room acoustics, and the sound guy's ear.
 
To be at the mercy of the tech is nothing that changed with the axe-fx vs real amps. It's always been like that. And therefore the best way to solve that problem is still the same. Send him a good signal. If he likes your signal, your guitar might be loud and fat in the mix. If he has no idea how to make your signal fit in the mix his last consequence is to lower it's volume, so the non fitting signal will not ruin the wole sound of the band. For sure he often enough has not enough time to search single frequencies to correct things and to make soundcheck forever with a guitar. The less presets you have the better then.
 
15" two way speaker designs cost $$ to get right. For the cheaper stuff, 12" two way speakers almost always sound better than their 15" counterparts.

Around the crossover freq there is usually a big hole. 3-way 15" are usually better and more even.

I just uses SMAART room analysis to EQ my rehearsal room. I've got expensive 2-way 15" tops and 18" subs.

There was a big dip at 347 and 2K (and a big bump at 60 and 497). Almost all the wrong places lol. Too much rumble (60 out of proportion to low mids), not punchy (not enough 347), boxy (too much 497) and lack of clarity (not enough 2K).
 
I don't think the prob is good PA or bad PA
the prob is that different PA's no matter if they are good or not don't sound the same..

if you can't / won't use your own monitoring live [which you used to dial into] then you're taking a big roll of the dice..

even switching make / model of FRFR system is not the same..

why throw your tone to the wolves?? makes no sense to me..
 
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My presets were dialed in on Equator D5 monitors, then at gig volume on our personal JBL PRX 600 sound system. If the venue (indoors or outdoors) is small enough, we insist on using our system (with no sound-man) even if there is a house system. If it's a bigger show then we use the house system or the system provided and their sound-man.

It always sounds different, but not terrible?

The speakers that you are dialing in your presets with must be far from flat.

It's like listening to music through different but decent sources. Different, but not usually terrible?
 
Through todays Pa it sounded harsh, trebly and scratchy. PA was an average vocal pA, but stage size meant no cabs, powered yamaha mixer sending to two ymaha 15" tops.

What did you use for stage monitors?

I like how everyone always assumes there's a sound guy at every gig too :)
 
What did you use for stage monitors? I like how everyone always assumes there's a sound guy at every gig too :)

I was thinking the same thing, Chris. On my gigs in clubs, I've had better luck doing a sound check and running sound myself. But I bring my own sound system to most of those venues, anyway. For bigger, actual shows, where the venue has their own PA, they usually have their own competent sound man, too. But a bad sound man can just totally ruin good music. And a bad PA can totally ruin a good sound man.

The OP's description is in keeping with mains where the woofer was burned out or damaged. But that should affect vocals, too. Did everything sound bad, or just your guitar? If it was just your guitar, maybe the guy has a HPF on that channel set to some odd frequency...like 2kHz.
 
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