# PA Clipping and quiet!



## Ben_Ferguson (Jun 6, 2016)

Hello everyone,

Recently bought a pair of Alto TS215 powered speakers. I also have a pair of crappy speakers, I believe they're branded LD or something. We run all our signal to the PA via a Behringer Xr18 desk, and our vocalist is using a Shure Beta 58.
Anyway, we're in a metalcore(?) band, and the only signal we run through the PA is vocals. My cleans, and his screams. No drums or cabs miced, no amp DIs, just vocals.
We're a very loud band.

We can not get the vocals loud enough to cut through the mix, and it's making the speakers clip.
We know almost nothing about live sound, so could anyone tell me what we can do to help the vocals cut without clipping the signal?
Are the speakers just not powerful enough?


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## RHEX-7 (Jun 7, 2016)

Ben_Ferguson said:


> Hello everyone,
> 
> Recently bought a pair of Alto TS215 powered speakers. I also have a pair of crappy speakers, I believe they're branded LD or something. We run all our signal to the PA via a Behringer Xr18 desk, and our vocalist is using a Shure Beta 58.
> Anyway, we're in a metalcore(?) band, and the only signal we run through the PA is vocals. My cleans, and his screams. No drums or cabs miced, no amp DIs, just vocals.
> ...



play quieter. the louder you guys play the more energy your drummer and singers use which in the end makes them more tired. im in a deathcore band, if we played our amps loud our poor drummer wouldnt be able to play through the set at practice. when your playing a live gig, the pa will amplify all of that. if your just rehearsing the songs theres no reason to play them loud at all. when my band practices we use peavey 6534+s and play them at 1.5 and its loud enough to level with the drums and the vocals have plenty of room for a boost if needed with everyone else able to hear each other. youll be able to hear the kick drum also which is a tough thing to get to cut through everything especially if theres muffling inside like pillows or blankets. we bought a $10 plastic pad that sticks to the drum head and it makes a click sound even with the pillows inside.

this is just my advice. theres no right or wrong.


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## noUser01 (Jun 12, 2016)

Set all of your volumes based on where your drums sound good. Your drummer should hit hard enough to get the aggression and consistency you want, and no more than that. Set the rest of your levels based on that. 

Stand where your audience would be. Your audience gets a very different picture of the sound than you do on stage, and they are the priority, not you. If you're cranking up your high end or volume on your amp because you can't hear it very well, you're just making it sound worse for the audience. If you can't hear yourself, you need to work on your monitoring setup (get in-ears, tilt your cab at an angle, stand further from your amp etc.) - don't sacrifice the audience's experience so your on-stage sound is better, you know?

Make sure you're EQing everything to sit in it's own space. For example, your guitars do not need a fat low end, that's what the bass guitar and kick are for. If both instruments have a fat low end, it just results in a muddy mix and a volume war. Mud because you've got too much frequency fighting in the same space, and volume war because the two players can't hear themselves because of that mud, so they just turn up. When dialing your tones to make everything sit in it's own space, make sure you're also listening from the audience perspective, not the stage perspective.

Make sure that everything is gain staged properly. If your PA speaker volume is on 2, then it doesn't matter how loud you crank the mixer, you can max it out and it'll still be quite because of the PA speakers. Start with your PA speakers set to half way, your mixer's master output at half way, match your bass and guitar volumes to the drums, then start turning up the individual vocal channel volumes. If it's not loud enough, then turn up the master output on the mixer and/or the PA speaker volume. I'm not familiar with the app for the XR18, but a lot of analog mixers have two controls that effect volume on each individual channel - gain and volume. Gain (also called Trim, usually a knob controls this) is for controlling how much volume is coming IN to that channel. Volume (usually a fader controls this) controls how much volume is going OUT of that channel.


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