Flyer for the event.
CRAS AES was proud to present its first officer led event of the year. Officer Aaron R
taught a group of students about the signal flow of CRAS' Gilbert Campus Live Sound
Room. To do this, he brought in a group of musicians to play on stage: a drummer, a
guitarist, a bassist, a vocalist and a lead vocalist/guitarist. Aaron would be running
Front of House (FOH) and Hannah, another CRAS student ran the Monitor area.
First, Aaron gave the attendees a sheet documenting all of the sound sources,
microphones, stage box inputs and stands needed on the stage. Then he took them
on a tour of the room in order of the signal flow, giving an overarching explanation of
the key places the signal flows through. Starting from the microphones on stage,
those feed three different stage boxes which lead offstage to an active splitter. "One
of the benefits of having an active splitter is you don't lose any level in the signal
when it splits", Aaron explained. From the splitter, the signal went both to the Venue
Stage Rack (which led to the Venue D Show and ultimately the line arrays on either
side) and the Midas M32 console (which was connected to the monitors for the
musicians on stage). Once everything was explained, the attendees had the chance to
set up the microphones and stands on stage and route signal from the stage boxes to
the splitter. Then, everyone observed the Monitor area as Aaron and Hannah sent the
musicians what they wanted to hear in their monitors, while adjusting the EQ of the
monitor feeds to avoid feedback between them and the amps or microphones. Afterwards, they went to the FOH section where Aaron used an oscillator outputting
pink noise to check the big PA, then he checked the levels of the musicians on stage.
Finally, once everything was setup, the musicians starting playing live and the
attendees had the option to freely roam between the FOH and Monitor Areas
observing how each area works in context with live sound. During the show Aaron
briefly showed the attendees how he sometimes adds various delays or reverbs using aux sends and FX returns. Then, how he uses a trigger (an unused FX return mute) to
trigger a tap tempo that feeds information to the aforementioned delays and reverbs.
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