Maschine Plus live through PA - any recommendations for getting best sound?

felipeazucares · 2023-11-22T18:54:29+00:00

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Hi,

I've been using my Maschine Plus to live jam as part of collective at a local rehearsal room. So we hook the Maschine's line outs to the provided vocal PA and the resulting sound is ... variable to say the least.

Any recommendations as to getting the best out of this piece of kit when it's out in the wild?

Thanks in advance

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D-One

"vocal PA" ? Are you connecting M+ to a mixer that then goes to the PA?

Are you using TRS/Balanced cables?

felipeazucares

Thanks for picking this up D-One - yeah the rehearsal space has about 9 rooms - all with Vocal PAs only. Not sure of the specs right now but can probably look them up if that helps. I'm justing running the M+ line outs into a pair of line ins on the board and panning them hard L/R - not using balanced cables. I'm pretty good with most tech/music stuff (software engineer if real life), but as far as live sound reinforcement goes I'm the first to admit I'm a bit of a neophyte.

djadidai

make sure you EQ your sounds, even if at group level, cut off the lowest lows and a bit of the highest highs, and make sure that kick and bass don’t create that mud in the low end so put separate eq on those. Also, make sure your mix is really good, the best tip I have for that is to listen in headphones at a very low volume and see what sticks out too much, most often it’s the hihats and snares and such. They should be lower than you’d think in most cases.

Then on the master level add a little saturation, a compressor - just a little so it’s doing its thing, and a limiter to -0,5dB, and crank that up a bit, but not too much, you don’t want your quiet parts to explode in volume.

That’s what I’d try at least. Or put separate saturators and compressors on group level with desired settings and a limiter on the master.

D-One

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/110007#Comment_110007

I'd start by getting balanced cables, if it's a must on stage to the point engineers use DI Boxes when devices don't have balanced outs then it should also be important in a rehearsal room with a PA.

Idk what a Vocal PA is, never heard of such a thing.. Do you mean a vocal booth?

I'm also unsure what "variable sound" might mean, it could be that your projects mixes just don't translate very well in that room/pa or that the mixing on the board itself is not right, maybe there's a compressor there on the board M+ channels or the master? There typically is to avoid people from blowing up speakers...

Smaller rehearsal PA's can quickly get saturated if too loud or there's lots of instruments going on, it's really hard to guess the exact problem but it's unlikely the issue is within the M+ itself.

tetsuneko

Before doing anything else, we must first establish the "baseline" sound quality of your PA

connect your phone or a CD player to the PA and play back some music you know well. If the music sounds full and as it should, you can then start to identify further issues. But even if commercial recordings sound "variable", you know the PA is to blame. However, if music sounds fine then either 1) you are connecting your Maschine to the PA weirdly (wrong output level or wrong cables) or 2) your mixes do not translate properly and you need to learn to mix better

If the PA only has XLR inputs, you probably want to use a (passive) DI box between your source, since usually XLR inputs in this sort of things expect a mic level signal. Always remember to ease the volume in from zero, since things can get loud by accident!

Kubrak

Also, I am not sure, what quality M+ audiointerface is, but for sure one may have better one.

But, in this case the weakest element may be the Vocal PA or some kind of mismatch in cabling. Proposed DI box might help and using ballanced cables from it to PA. It would also electrically isolate PA and M+.

tetsuneko

For whatever its worth, I have never been able to discern any audible difference in sound quality between various DA converters over a large PA system. PA's aren't studio monitors, and the vast majority of venues where one typically finds a PA are acoustically terrible

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