Hi, I'm in a bluegrass music club. We get together for weekly jams and fun, purely acoustic. Most of the folks have very little experience in live performance with sound reinforcement. At 55 I'm one of the youngest members.
A smaller subset of our club performs at retirement homes and farmers markets a few times a month. I set up the PA with individual vocal and instrument mics (SM58 and 57 or similar dynamic mics) for up to 7 of us at these shows. Its a challenge getting that many mics, stands and wires arranged, attempting to train these older folks how to use them, preventing feedback, accomodating their monitor needs (some ears don't work that well), and getting a good balanced sound out to the audience. We don't have someone running the sound real time which I know would help. I spent most of the last few years as a solo or duo which was pretty easy to handle. I think I'm the only one in our club with internal pickups as well.
Would a few condenser (or broader pattern) mics spread around the stage work better? I don't think we'll ever be up to the onstage-bluegrass-band-dance around a single condenser level. Or any other ideas that might work? Thank as always.
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