Hey guys, I am in need of some help as my band have been practicing and practicing like crazy for the past year to get a PERFECT live set together of our metal band. We feel were very close to achieveing an awesome, energetic live show and are now on the hunt for a decent P.A. system for the venues we will be playing that don't have them, pubs/clubs etc.

I would greatly appreciate the advice/knowledge of anyone with gigging experience on the forum and could maybe point me in the right direction for decent industry standards for the makes/wattage/output etc of any of these systems.

For example, what would be better for a 6 piece metal band, with 2 guitars, bass, drums, synths and vocals, a power mixer with the Pa generally in one unit or seperate components with eq, seperate speakers and mixer etc.

Again I would be over the moon if any of you guys could help point me in the right direction, my thing is more towards music production than live sound and research with google can only get you so far.

Oh and my budget would probably be around the 600 pounds mark/ 1000 dollar mark roughly, split beteen the six of us.

Thanks in advance fellas.

Do you really need your own PA? All good venues will have their own PA and you should probably focus on instruments, amps and effects etc. I'd probably even consider getting nice mics for the drum kit before I got a PA. Its good if you want to put your own gigs on but getting gigs at good venues may be a bit more worthwhile.

Where I live in the south of England, theres alot of venues without their own P.A. system that we'd need in order to play there, plus we can use it in our rehearsal space to get tuned into using it and its sound etc.

As far as the instrument front goes, were all good for that too for the time being, got some pretty decent gear. Main thing on our agenda is the P.A. and achieving the best live sound possible. Thanks for the reply though, it's appreciated.

I think you should more precisely think about the scenarios where you'll need to use your own PA, and exactly what requirements you need from it. My guess is you'd only be running the vocals, synths, and miced bass drum through the PA, or? Something simple would be enough, no? It's good to keep in mind that for gigging, simpler is always better. There's less points of failure, and less stuff to carry

We don't have our own PA stuff, but have borrowed a friend's set a couple of times. It consists of a simple, cheap, Behringer mixer and two decent 300W active speakers (can't remember the brand). Worked great for us.

The question is...what equipment might you already have? Any mics? A compressor maybe?

For that big of a band, separating the instruments will be crucial for a clear sound. You'd be hard pressed to get a decent new setup for $1000. Especially if you have to buy mics...

Thanks so much for the replies guys!

Yeah, guitarwise we are sorted, with brilliant cabs and heads, we are getting a trigger for the kick drum and wish to use a drum module to route this through the P.A.

But you pretty much hit it bang on, our main usage for it will be for the vocals and synths with an sm57's micing cymbals and snare. Based on that, would anyone have any cheap but fairly good recommendations on makes/models of equipment we would/should use.

Basically, the routing would be this-

Vocals
Synths
Kick via trigger-sound module.
Snare and cymbals via sm57's

all routed through the P.A., so a setup catered to that would be perfect. I would so appreciate any knowledge or feedback/suggestions, would help us out more than you can imagine. Cheers again in advance.

Basically, the routing would be this-

Vocals
Synths
Kick via trigger-sound module.
Snare and cymbals via sm57's

Ok.. looks like you'd be playing somewhat larger clubs than us. Are you sure you need to mic the snare and cymbals? I think that would be overkill for the places we've been playing.

I'm not really an expert at this stuff, but my suggestion would be to find a simple mixer which can handle all of those inputs, and as much tweakability (EQ, reverb?) that you might need. Essentially you'd want the simplest device which satisfies your demands You said you're on a budget, so one possible brand would be Behringer, which is very cheap, but still ok quality-wise. Particularly their mixers are (supposedly) decent, while much of the rest of their stuff is crap...

Couple that with two good full-range active speakers. With powered speakers I'd say there's less worrying about how well it works with your particular mixer, and it's easier to replace one or the other if necessary.

But that's just my opinion. It would be nice to hear other people's experiences too, as our band will probably be getting some kind of PA set too, at some point.


EDIT: I figured I'd just throw out some example products along the lines I was thinking

http://www.dv247.com/mixers/behringer-x ... xer--31549
This Behringer mixer seems to have just enough inputs for you... You might want to consider a slightly bigger one, just in case you need a few more mics for whatever reason.

2x http://www.dv247.com/pa-systems-and-liv ... aker--6039
No idea if these are good or not, but from the description is seems like they should be decent.

Those add up to 700 £, so, almost within your budget

Thanks v much Grrv, checking into those as we speak, you've been a huge help, will give more feedback soon into my search, anyone else's opinion or ideas on this kind of setup would be so gratefully received.