I just attended a really outstanding production at my granddaughter’s school. The direction was excellent, the talent excellent, the choreography excellent, the costumes even better…the only thing lacking was a sound system that would have enabled the audience to actually hear the singing and other dialogue.
There were speakers, I think, broadcasting the background music and sound effects. A keyboard was frequently used, probably with its own amplifier.
I judged that if they had three or four inputs (not a high ceiling) above the actors, and a few speakers facing the audience, the enjoyment factor might have gone through the roof. As it was, the show was a visual treat and what singing and speaking we heard was well done – those kids have some actual talent.
So. Does anyone know what it would take to buy and install a bit of a system? A sound board, I guess, with 6 inputs? I don’t know if more than one output would be needed, just a way to drive 3 or 4 small speakers, mono would be okay.
How large is the room?
How many in the audience?
How many performers?
Are some of the performers, hmm, more featured than others?
Aside from the speakers and mixing board mentioned, you’d need microphones, cables, and probably some speaker stands. The mics for the featured soloist(s) (narrow input) are different than for the chorus (wider input pattern). For a live performance to a large audience, it is often a good idea to have someone at the mixer at all times.
How big is the room?
How big is the budget?
Do you want a permanent installation or something portable?
Who will run it?
The Fender Passport series units are quite decent all-in-one systems that are fairly intuitive to use and decently rugged, making them popular at schools. They’re portable so you can use them in a classroom, small auditorium or even outside, with the bonus of being easily secured after use.
Something like the Passport Venue might work well for you in a gym-sized space. It can accept four mics and two line-level inputs as well as Bluetooth so you could wirelessly send music from a smartphone. These sell for about $700, but you’d probably want to add tripod stands and possibly extension cables for the speakers, plus mics, cables, and stands for them if you don’t already have them, making a realistic low-end budget about $1,000-1,500.
If you want more flexibility and more inputs, you’d need to look at separate components - mixer, amps, and speakers. The complexity level goes up exponentially, unfortunately. I’ve got a 12-input mixer that is festooned with 30 1/4" phone jacks. (think old-style big headphone plugs/jacks rather than telephones) and 60+ knobs.
Something else to consider is to rent PA systems if there’s not a frequent need.
This room is roughly 20 by 100, all one level except a raised stage on one end. seating about 250, maybe. No slope to the seating, so seeing the action in front of the stage is almost impossible beyond the first couple of rows. It is a ‘multi-purpose’ room and the kids and teachers just try their best to adapt to it.
The performance included 73 students, with 5 or 6 soloists. One performer delivers a lot of zingers and doesn’t sing. There are a dozen or so group songs.
Ceiling is suspended sound deadening 2x4 panels, probably about 9 feet, maybe a little less. I think the walls are all hard surfaced.
I don’t know that it would have been really necessary for soloists to have a microphone right over them or and clip on UHF mike, etc. The room
As noted above - good sound is complicated. It is actually harder than video. Just ading a PA system can often do little more than make rotten sound into louder rotten sound.
The most important part of the problem is always the room. And of course that is often the hardest thing to fix. A multi-use room is going to need acoustic properties that don’t make other activities harder.
But, first up, that is an evil room setup. it is a rectangular prism roughly 10-2-1. With a low sound adsorbent ceiling, and with a full house, sound is only getting to the back via a pretty tortuous route. The reverb time will be close to zip. A common way of addressing this is to place a number of relatively small speakers along the long walls pointing into the audience. However to get the sound to be reasonable you need to add delay to each row of speakers so that the sound they emit matches the delay of the direct sound. Just putting a few speakers at the sides of the stage won’t fix the problems of how sound is propagating to the back. In many ways this is reminiscent of how a movie theatre is set up. (Movie theatres are not set up in the same way as home theatres as the distances involves make the tradeoffs significantly different.)
Giving performers Lavier radio mics would probably help over handheld microphones. Using a handheld or stand-mounted mic requires additional skills.
Finally you need someone who has some clue to actually mix things. Setting up the desk requires skill, even if there is little more mixing during performance than turning various inputs on and off. A soft touch is needed. Really good sound is inaudible ( ) . It should just sound like the performers are performing, but clear everywhere. There should never be a definable “amplified” sound. Audience members should be asking after performance “Why did you still have speakers set up? I guess you decided you didn’t need them.” Sadly you often get the “make everything louder than everything else”* approach, which just gets you where you were before, but worse.
Given the marvels of modern electronics the solution need not be expensive. Indeed you don’t need or want anything big and powerful. It just needs to be carefully matched to the needs. You need to talk to a local professional.
OK, it worked for Deep Purple, but they had a sound engineer who knew better than they did what was really needed.
who knew the answer was “you need to talk to a professional”??? But, yes, I understand. I think anything more than a few mikes and a few speakers is beyond the needs or capability of this school. The need might grow over time, but schools are always short of the finances needed to have people with the ‘right touch’ on staff or on call.
But, I will ask the admin folks there if they would mind calling in a pro to give an estimate, and, if, as you say, the cost is not extreme, maybe we can find a way to provide the hardware.
Do you have a local theatre that does live performances? Or amateur groups that perform on stage.
My nephew does the sound and lights for a number of local groups and schools for not much more than expenses. You need to ask around to see if there is anyone in your town who does the same. You have to ask, as unless they are a parent of a child at the school, they are not going to come forward themselves.
great idea. I’ll ask the school if they have any leads.
At one private school some years ago, one of the kids was the son of a famous southern rock band lead guy, and he wasn’t even the best guitarist there. They weren’t large enough to have any sort of big productions.
At this school, I suspect over 20% of the enrollment were in the cast and others must have been giving support behind the scenes, as well. It was a remarkably capable job…except for the sound.
Worth mentioning a few aspects that a proper consultant will be looking at.
To sound good the reverb time in a room is critical. Sadly what is a good time for music is not a good time for spoken word. You will find any room used for scholastic purposes a bit dry and dead for music. But what really makes things wretched is the long low geometry. The sound will just vanish into this - especially when it is full of people. The usual way of coping with sound along a long area of audience is a phased array - one of those long chains of speaker boxes hung from a high point that curves inward at the bottom. But you have no height, so any sort of single speaker array by the stage isn’t going to work.
A professional acoustic consultant will be looking at the acoustic properties of the room, and its geometry, working out the properties when the audience is seated, and working out the solution that fits the use cases you have. A solution might simply involve a lot of speakers mounted in the acoustic ceiling tiles. But the devil of details will include appropriate delay and frequency shaping.
Another component might be the addition of some hard acoustic reflection and diffusion around the stage area. They may liven the sound up significantly and move away from the dead dry sound you probably currently have. That could be pretty cheap materials wise.
Then you can look at the appropriate level of mixing desk, microphones and support. A big part of this process isn’t asking a PA reseller to quote on a setup. Rather it is a careful analysis of the acoustics.
First…20’ x 100’ and it seats 250 people? That seems pretty tight. Fortunately, this is not a critical issue.
Second…I don’t really think that reverb, time-delay, equalization, or any of those more esoteric issues are going to be major concerns in this venue. What you want is a simple sound reinforcement system.
I would get a couple self-powered (internal amplifier) units on folding stands and put one at each side of the stage. You can make the sound mixing and wireless systems (if you need wireless) as simple or complex as you care to.
Forget the consultant. I just don’t see this as being one of those situations where you need digital delays and other technologies. And you probably don’t even need anyone riding the mixer once you get it adjusted during a rehearsal, though you might want to have someone watching your wireless mics if they get carried off-stage at some point.
Plus 73 (!) performers. And the ceiling is 9 (!) feet high. Visualize a corridor rather than than an auditorium. I can understand why the performers’ natural sound was not so hot.
This is a challenging venue for sound reinforcement.
I think a pair of PA speakers high in the upper corners of the front of the house will be an improvement (assuming adequate mic’ing) but will fall short of ‘great’ sound.
I know someone that does sound for some local amateur bands. These bands may only play outside of their usual garages or basements once or twice a year and can’t justify buying, storing, and maintaining all the gear to fill a bar or pig roast with rock. I don’t know the specifics but I’m certain he’s quite inexpensive. Perhaps there’s someone like that near OP, though he doesn’t advertise and gets work by word of mouth. Also, consider asking the local wedding DJs.
yes, tight. an aisle on each side and one down the center, often in use by the players. I am told that the director was pleading for the two months of rehearsals for all the speakers and singers to project as much as they could, perhaps anticipating the deadening effect of the room being filled with 20 dozen chairs and people.
I am also told the music director fellow tried to locate some speakers and so forth but couldn’t get the money to rent them. Wish he’d asked parents for help, then we’d know what worked and what didn’t. I know that during the performance, he began playing a loud piano, but switched to a softer keyboard after the first couple of numbers, as he was completely drowning out the singing at first.
Again, the play was very enjoyable, even without great sound, but it could have been so much better…
I can understand the need for a few extra dB of sound in this situation. This is how I see it:
This is NOT a large venue where multiple speakers are separated from the performers and scattered throughout the venue. In cases like that, you DO need to consider delay effects. This is a case where the speakers can be in the “performance plane,” or very close to it. Simple.
With 250 people in the room (which still shocks me), you will have a pretty anechoic environment. Few things absorb sound as well as people packed into a small space. No need to worry about standing waves, reverberation, and other high-tech issues common to auditoriums and churches.
Get a pair of stand-mounted speakers from Behringer, Fender, Peavey, Yamaha, or similar. Do not get a system designed for conferences…go for those suitable for music performances. The set (with mixer/amp) will be less than $900.
Get some mics. This is the part that may require some advice. Suspend them? Put them on stands? Mix them up with wireless units? In any of these cases, you will probably spend between $400 and $600.
Boom! $1500 or less, and you’ll be very pleased with the results. No permanent installation costs and you can move them around or even take them to other sites for other purposes.
Forget the consultant. I do this type of consulting and I would turn down the job, telling you exactly what I just did.
The newer ones have simpler and more intuitive controls. That churches, schools and amateur musicians can easily adjust.
Watch the video demonstration at this link. A very portable system that can be securely stored and quickly setup when needed.
One of the controls is marked speech/music. Making it easy for volunteers to operate. A typical school play requires speech. A school musical, uh music.
It would be wonderful to have a pro running the sound board. Usually it doesn’t work out that way.
The trick is to not blast the folks up front, while boosting the volume in the back. In a relatively small space as this, two good quality speakers should do. But take care where they are mounted and aimed. Sound pressure falls off to the sides. So mount a bit high and aim to the back of the room. You can get a meter for a reasonable price. Send a test tone through the system and wander around the room. This is just a very crude suggestion to get started. The sound pressure pattern of speakers varies. If you only use a couple of speakers. Don’t mount them too high. It displaces the origin point.
) . It should just sound like the performers are performing, but clear everywhere. There should never be a definable “amplified” sound. Audience members should be asking after performance “Why did you still have speakers set up? I guess you decided you didn’t need them.” Sadly you often get the “make everything louder than everything else”* approach, which just gets you where you were before, but worse.