DBX GoRack - field report
Have mentioned these before, but last night we hit a real 'situation'. Arrived at a gig to find that the contractors who were supposed to have finished renovating and rebuilding the stage area had, in fact, only just started... and we were faced with literally bare concrete walls on all sided, a marble floor, and hard, low ceiling. It was an acoustic nightmare waiting to happen. Worse, we now jammed right at the end of a room that most closely resembled a concrete tunnel. On top of that, we had our friend Gibb Todd (from the Kerries, Celtic Connections, and who has recorded with Tim O'Brien and Alison Brown, etc) as our special guest, and Gibb does like some on-stage monitoring....
This is where you need a Plan B and I always carry what I call my "bad room box" which consists of some mics and a few other items that I have found to work really well in dire situations. I added a DBX GoRack to that box some months back, and last night it got a real work-out.
Basic setup was a single main QSC K10 and I used a QSC K8 as a floor monitor. Mixer was a QSC Touchmix 8. Two vocal mics - EV PL80a's, which are a really tight hypercardiod pattern and sound very good even in 'challenging' situations like this. The AKG D5's are also good. One instrument mic, in this case I used my 'old faithful' Shure SM94 - another mic that can work well just about anywhere. Gibb likes to DI his instruments (I had an Orchid dual active DI box set for him), but I wanted to avoid plugging mine in, so I stuck with the stand-mounted SM94 and just worked it really close.
Initially, during soundcheck, the room was ringing like a bell. The Touchmix has some very good EQ options though, and it was possible (surprisingly) to tame most of it. Even so, if anyone moved off a mic, the back wall just reflected so much sound straight at them that the beginnings of feedback were evident. OK. Out comes the little Go-Rack. I set this to dual independent channel mode, and sent the AUX 1 Monitor feed through one channel and the main feed to the K10 through the other. The only active processing was was the auto feedback suppression. This is a very simple box... the one thing it does not have that I wish it did was some indication of how many filters it is using... you can hear them latch on, but there is no actual indicator. Regardless, it was really excellent at grabbing any incipient feedback before it got going. It was very transparent too. Very clean. I had the vocal and instrument mics gated (via the Touchmix) once soundchecks were over, and performance started. That also helped. Bottom line is that the little DBX unit did a really good job. A few times when anyone moved off axis, it automatically detected and notched that feedback right out far more rapidly that I could have managed manually, and it did it without carving huge chunks of adjacent frequencies away with it (the notches are super-tight). It was not any easy room... but at the end, everyone was happy and the sound was good (considering the difficulties). I was really glad to have that little box with me and I can genuinely recommend it as something to consider as for the silly low price these things are, they are an incredibly useful addition to anyone's "bad room" kit.
Gibson F5 'Harvey' Fern, Gibson F5 'Derrington' Fern
Distressed Silverangel F 'Esmerelda' aka 'Maxx'
Northfield Big Mon #127
Ellis F5 Special #288
'39 & '45 D-18's, 1950 D-28.
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