Mini Drum Shield

For the last few months we have not been using a drum shield and for the most part it's been good. The band loves it and our stage and room is big enough that it's been ok. As a little background, we have been going to a more rock n roll sound and I've been working really hard at creating a really big r-n-r sound while keeping it smooth and for the most part at 95db a-weighted or less.

With these parameters in our room I realized I was right at what I'd call the "snare threshold."  This is the point at which you are able to put enough of the snare in the pa so that the snare and any verbs are fully present in the pa versus the snare mainly coming acoustically from the stage and you are mixing around it.  With no drum shield I was finding that when I'd get the full drum sound I wanted, the resulting overall loudness feel was a little to hot.  I say loudness because i'm not really talking about a large increase in overall db but it made the drums very much more in your face which would increase the complaint ratio.  (this topic alone, the nuances of mixing in this environment, could be a separate blog on it's own.)

So this got me thinking, what if I could have a shorter drumshield who's only purpose was to block the snare from me.  Since we have a long history with drum shields, I found 3 older panels we had laying around and cut them to 34". This height gets us to just under the top rim of the toms with our drummer. The result is I get what I want, less snare bleed to FOH, and Phil our drummer is happy because it still feels like there isn't a drum shield. So far it's been great. I might even experiment with going to just 2 panels. I will say once or twice I've wished it was high enough to block the hihat but it hasn't been very often. 

This obviously won't work for everyone. It completely depends on your room, pa, and your churches worship culture but it's working for me. I'm curious if anyone else has done something similar. Also you actually can buy a very similar sized shield from Clear-Sonic. It's actually a Joe Bonamassa edition shield for guitar amps but it's basically the same size. 

2014 So Far

It's been a very long time since I've posted so I figured I'd give a little recap for the year so far. It's been a great one so far. 

Back in January I was part of the team who traveled to Leipzig, Germany to do the Leadership Summit. It was a very hard, but very rewarding 90 hour week. We were in an exibition hall that I believe was built in the 80's when there wasn't much thought given to building codes. As a result the weight load for a single point was very low so the pa was 2 smaller main hangs and a bunch of delay hangs all around the room. We had an L'acoustics Kara rig provided by Babbel & Haeger that sounded amazing. We took a monster room, hung what seemed like miles of truss to make a room within the room and I couldn't believe how great it felt.  

It was my first real show with the Yamaha CL-5 and that was fun. Really got to dive into the desk and explore the features of it since we pretty much used every input. It's such a great sounding desk. 

At some point during the conference I had an attender come up and tell me that it was the best sound he had ever heard in that room. Just to have more perspective on his comment I asked how many shows he had seen there and the answer was 3. It wasn't the 300 shows I was hoping for but I'll take best of 3. 

I also used for the first time the dpa 4080 lav on some of our speakers. I was amazed how great that sounded in a huge hall with 8000 people.

Audio Truck on Load in

View of setup from last row in corner

Great pic of FOH with the lit bleacher stairs behind.

Another highlight from the year so far was our Easter services.  To me the center piece was a little green piano.  It was an old piano that our video director found in his neighbors trash a couple years ago. It says Marshall Fields on it so apparently that's where you could buy it.  He brought it in and we got it fixed up and we used it for this song.  You can watch it here.  Song starts at about 3:15.  By the end of the weekend there was a bunch of us who wanted to take this thing home.

Also around this time we installed 2 new Yamaha CL5 consoles in our Lake Side Auditorium.  I love these desks and and so blessed to get to use these every week.

So a lot has happened during the first 5 months of this year.  Hopefully i'll be a little more consistent with posts here about what I'm doing.  I have a couple of other projects that i've been up to that will be fun to share.

Lights and Midi

This is one of the fun things i've been working on the last few weeks in prep for our Christmas services.
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One Church Many Voices

Back in late January and early February I had the honor of traveling to S. Africa and Zambia to help record some choirs from churches we partner with in those countries.  It was a life altering experience.

The result of that is a cd that is available now.  Best of all it's free.  To listen or download click

HERE  

Pretending to be a sax player

Throwin down some horns.

2 Songs i've been listening to non stop.