Re: [Harp-L] Performance setup - hearing and feedback

[David Michelsen Tuition <dmharpman@xxxxxxxxx>]

 HI
Some thoughts I'd like to share.
Given that the time frame that I'm talking about here is the late 
1970's. I have a best friend, Rory Caules, who was learning how to be a 
sound engineer, as I was becoming a blues harp player. The sophisticated 
on stage fold back systems of today were in their childhood then.

Taking a guitar amp and using it as fold back was becoming a common 
thing. However for a harp player this mostly didn't work. The reason for 
this was that amps then, much as now, were designed for direct 
injection. So they would be designed 'hot' both in the pre-amp & amp and 
speaker stages over certain frequency slots. This worked fine for  
everything except mic's. So as a harp player you were best off going 
through the P.A. and trusting to your engineer to set the sound right.

So the bands that I ran had a simple rule set:
Above all listen,
If you cant hear an instrument, then turn down and ask the front of 
house engineer, what's it's sounding like front of house.

the idea of turning down and not up still holds good.

You can do so much more by inviting your audience to listen, rather than 
trying to overwhelm them with the weight of sound. The getting of an on 
stage balance where every one can hear what they need  is tricky and 
almost never cheap. What a musician needs to hear to play isn't always 
the same as what the audience needs to hear as an overall sound.

Also a band can do so much to help it's self by running rehearsals at 
low sound levels. From these rehearsals comes the knowledge that it will 
all sound all right even if you can't hear all that you would wish to.

I suppose that much of this comes from an inner sense of listening, 
where one listens to the intent of ones fellow players.
doing what one can to work to one's best in imperfect situations.

I also don't like the bullet mic but personally prefer a miniature 
capsule system like Senhierer's red dot system.
a good tool in the prevention of feedback is a 'noise-gate', which will 
cut the Mic. when there is no signal. So when you're not playing the 
thing is off. It isn't the entire answer to unwanted feedback 
elimination and brings a few problems of it's own but it can be a realy 
useful tool.

Most of these things are better handled through the main P.A.'s effects 
rack than through stomp boxes, in my experience.

Yours David

On 28/04/2011 12:44, John F. Potts wrote:
> There is a well known harp player (I forget who) who has said that if 
> you can hear yourself when you are comping you are playing too loud. 
> When playing in an electric/amplified environment you've just got to 
> accept that there will be occasions when hearing yourself may be a 
> problem.  Often bands that play too loud get too loud because one of 
> the musicians can't hear himself well enough, so he turns up, then 
> another musician turns up, and so on, until the whole band is too damn 
> loud.
>
> I'm not a fan of bullet mics for a number of reasons, one of which is 
> that many of the more popular commercially available bullets are 
> feedback prone.  A fairly reliable method for controlling feedback in 
> a live performance situation is to use a mic with a volume control, 
> set the amp's volume at the "sweet spot" (which may be pretty high) 
> and backing off the volume on the mic itself to set performance level 
> volume.  This reduces the output gain so that the mic is not as hot 
> and will usually control feedback while allowing the player to get 
> good tone from the amp.
>
> The tone of some mics will degrade if the mic volume is turned down, 
> but many (like Greg Heumann's Ultimate series mics) sound just fine 
> used this way.  Some amps are just too high gain for the method I have 
> described to work well for controlling feedback, in which case the 
> player needs to swap out preamp tubes.  If your mic doesn't have a VC 
> another way to accomplish output signal gain reduction is to use an 
> MXR 10 band EQ pedal which has gain and volume controls and use those 
> to reduce how "hot" the output signal from the mic is.  Of course, you 
> can also use the EQ freq sliders to notch out the freqs that are 
> feeding back.  But the gain and volume sliders are actually more 
> useful than the EQ adjustments.
>
> Personally, I am not a fan of harp specific amps and I don't like what 
> the Kinder AFB+ does to my tone.  But, depending on what kind of tone 
> you are after, some bass amps can sound very decent for harp and are 
> less feedback prone than many guitar amps.  But if you are after a 
> "crunchy" or distorted Chicago type tone, a bass amp is not going to 
> give you that.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> JP

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