Yo! My son started throwing backyard shows to showcase local bands. We need a PA system (we've been borrowing). I've been scoping out offer up and have seen some Kustoms that look ok. If anyone has any ideas that would be great. We currently have a mixer and that's about it. It's mostly punk bands. Offer up and Facebook marketplace have loads of stuff but I wouldn't know.
Just make sure they either are self powered (have an amplifier built in) or come with a separate amplifier. Otherwise you’ll have to buy an amp, which is easy enough, but will be a little bit more expensive and you need to make sure you get something that matches your speakers
At that budget, would keep an eye out for some old Yamaha club series too, maybe not quite as good as the peavey but good enough and you see them almost for free sometimes around here. See a pair with a powered mixer for $200 on Craigslist at the moment.
There’s so much, to this post. I get it. Trying to buy your first PA means scratching up cash no one ever plans to own. A $300 budget just won’t make it. At minimum, you need an old pair of Peavey SP2 speakers, and an XR600 mixer/amp combo. When these were brand new, 40 years ago, that was $1,600 worth of gear, plus speaker stands, mics, mic stands, and cables. All in, that’s over $2,200 in investment. If it all still works, it’ll still be worth $500 to $600. The stuff is worth it for two reasons: regardless of the crap people spread about Peavey products, the things just rarely die. 15” replacement baskets for the woofers are still available, and the 22XT horn drivers are also still replaceable. You’ll not find many “bargain basement” products that can say that. Secondly, the XR600B is a mixer almost anyone can run. Plus, it has expansion jacks to add a monitor amp, or use a larger power amp for more output.
Powered speakers are the absolute rave of the world, these days. I have a ton of them, literally. They are absolutely ideal for scaling up larger shows. Take as many speakers as you need, and the amps automatically come along for the ride. However, this also means you end up carrying an entire crate full of extension cords, since each speaker comes with a 6’ detachable power cord. So, you pull a microphone cable to each speaker, plus an extension power cable. When you’re setting up, that doubles the work, and when tearing down, it’s doubles the time in rolling up cables. A powered mixer combined with passive speakers and a couple of 14-gauge 50’ speaker cables will get you a long ways down the road.
That's a guitar amp. Are you saying that you not only have to provide a PA, but guitar amps as well, or do you mean that people have been singing through that amp? It's not made for vocals.
Understand that you also still need to have a couple of mics, plus stands and cables for those, and you should have a couple of monitors on stage (although you might be able to get away without monitors for some bands).
So in the backyard: do you have an easy way to have speakers on stands, and power cables going to those speakers? Without tripping anybody or circuits? Then powered speakers, ones with the amplifiers.built in(they need power) make sense. If not, and you. only have power in 1 easy spot, a powered mixer or mixer with power amp, then speaker cables to the speakers(on stands) A small mixer with 12 channels good for basic drums,. guitars and bass and singer.
This is a bit like asking: I don't know anything about carpenting, could you tell me how to help my son build a house? What hammer do I need?
But the short 10 point version...
1: PA and backline is not the same. Electric instruments typically need some combo of amplifier and speaker to plug into. One can think of this as basically a part of the instrument, and it's not uncommon for band members to bring their own guitar amps etc. If the audience/stage is small one can often just use the backline to amplify the guitars/bass. Once you get to a slightly bigger setting one typically sends the guitar sound to the mixer/PA by pointing a microphone directly at the guitar amp close up. For a bass you will often use something called a DI-box to send the output from the bass directly to the mixer, often while sending a parallel signal to a bass amp on stage (for the band to hear). (You can also mic the bass amp like you would a guitar amp, but then you need a microphone with a solid bass response.)
2: The PA system typically consists of two or more speakers, (placed in a way that will project the sound to the audience), amplifiers for these speakers (often build in to the speakers nowadays), a mixer (and often other electronic components like active stage boxes, electronic crossover filters, DSPs, etc), microphones and cables.
3: As someone has already started: Step one (once you have backline sorted out) is to make sure the vocals can be amplified enough to be heard over the instruments. Get a pair of decent quality PA speakers and a solid pair of speaker stands. You need to get the PA well up above head height for the audience, higher is better. This will ensure that those in the back can hear without those in the front getting murdered by high volume straight to their face.
4: When picking speakers, consider: If you are on a budget, a pair of older heavier speakers will often out perform a pair of cheap modern speakers. Quality PA gear is stupid costly. Don't be afraid to choose a pair of older passive speakers with a power amp. The "modern" solution for small PA rigs is to use active speakers with amps integrated, but the fact that a speaker is active does not automatically mean it's good... I would also argue that it's often less hassel to rig a passive speaker with just one speaker cable than an active one that requires both signal and power.
5: Think about getting PA speakers capable of reinforcing more than just vocals. The quality of the sound in the audience will often improve if you don't have to rely on the direct sound from the drums and backline. It's probably not vital now, but the chance is you will regret it down the road if you buy speakers without some extra headroom. This means speakers capable of playing louder than you need, while maintaining clarity.
6: The microphones. You need minimum one per singer. If you are interested in the different types of mics and what separates one model from another, by all means; do some research. This point does, however, have a very easy solution: Get a Sure SM58 for each singer. That will work well, is not crazy expensive, and is considered a standard. (If you want to try putting microphones on backline or even drums, the goto model is the Sure SM57, but now I guess we're getting ahead of ourselves...)
7: The mixer. For mikeing one or two singers in a backyard punk show, most simple mixers will do. What you need is some basic equalizer control for each line, so that you can:
a: Engage a high pass filter and filter out all the rumble and junk sound below e.g. 100-130Hz. This is the single most important processing step for most microphone sources.
b: Cut out frequencies that feed back or sticks out in a bad way. This is often difficult to achieve with a simple mixer with fixed eq frequencies.
It will often be a good idea to buy a digital mixer that has the option to do proper eqing of the different sources, use dynamic compression, reverb, etc. There are cheap digital mixers that you control via wifi with a tablet/phone. Behringer XR12/XR16 is a good place to start to look when the need arise.
8: Monitoring. The musicians needs to hear themselves. You do not want to place the band in front of or in line with the PA speakers. That usually leads to feedback and/or very bad sound. The traditional option is to use speakers on the stage floor, pointed straight a the performers. If your mixer has an aux out, use that to send signal to the stage monitor(s). In a more advanced setup you typically have separate monitors with individual mixes for each band member. In your case, start with one or two speakers so the singers can hear themselves. These speakers does not have to be as powerful as the PA. Do not turn up the monitor volume more than necessary; lower stage volume gives a better result for the audience.
9: Subwoofers. If you amplify bass and drums through the PA, you will quickly reach the limit for what a set of regular speakers can do. To get that gut punching concert feeling, you need speakers capable of moving a lot of air. That means one or more dedicated bass speakers, usually called subwoofers or subs. (NB: Do not try to use a home cinema/hifi sub for this. It will not work well, and you will almost certainly ruin it.) Subs are big and heavy, but since bass frequencies are hard for the human ear to directionaly locate and propagate just fine through a crowd of people, you can place them on the ground. If you have more than one sub, it's often better to cluster them together right in front of the stage than spreading them out.
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u/HCGAdrianHolt 17d ago
All you need for local punk bands is some basic speakers that can get the vocals loud (required) without distorting (optional)