TANGENT SERIES 4

TANGENT SERIES 4

EXTENSION CHORD

by Allen Hester

Putting together a sound system and keeping it in operation on the road is one of the more bothersome tasks in rock ’n’ roll. It’s certainly less fun than just about anything else a musician has to do, except load the trailer. Granted, some of your better-known musicians don’t have to actually lay hands on all that gear and do the maintenance work and the physical labor, but you can bet that any musician is concerned about the sound system. It’s the vehicle through which musicians are able to reach thousands of fans at one sitting, and problems with the sound system mean that nobody—fans, promoters, or musicians— has a good time.

Just a few short years ago, most musicians were far more concerned with their own immediate equipment, whether it be guitars, keyboards, drums, or the amplifiers, than they were with the sound system. I can recall watching many groups with stacks of Marshall amps and fine vintage guitars struggle through the night with a lousy sound system. Almost invariably, the vocals were buried beneath the instruments, and a lot of good vocal cords were destroyed as the singer tried to scream above the roar of 100-watt amps. Of course there will always be a place in rock ’n’ roll for loud amps and screaming vocalists, I suppose, but there’s a vast difference in the way that’s achieved these days.

The big shift is toward an extremely efficient sound system and smaller, more versatile instrument amplifiers. Not smaller in wattage, necessarily, but smaller in size. * Most amps coming into the market these says have a Preamp output on the rear panel so that a low-level signal can be fed into a mixing console. This signal is routed through the sound system and into the hall, and the engineer has control over the volume, tone and special effects such as echo, etc. On the stage, the musician has control over how the amp sounds to the band, how it blends with the rest of the instruments so that everybody can hear each other, and nobody gets too loud and drowns out the other guys. So it can be comfortable to listen to on stage, yet just short of the threshold of pain out in the conceit hall.

At the heart of all this sophisticated network of power amps, speaker enclosures, multichannel “snake” cables, microphones, monitors and such is the mixing console: Mission Control, if you will. This particular component has come a long way since the days of the old six-channel high impedance' self-powered mixer/amp that had virtually no tone, control, no monitor send, and very little of anything except reverb—boy, those things were long on reverb, but short on everything else.

Now, you can buy mixers just like the old one I just described; they are still around, but you can also buy small mixers that are vastly superior. And you can spend thousands of dollars on the more advanced 24-(or more) track mixing consoles. At whatever level your band operates, both in terms of budget and performance demands, there is a mixer available that will do thejob.

Take for instance the Series 4 mixing consoles made by Tangent Systems. This

particular product is suitable for both live performance and 4or 8-track recording sessions. You can buy this mixer in either a 12 input or a 20 input fully modularized mainframe. This means that you could start out with 12 inputs without having to trade the unit in for a bigger board. The whole concept of modular inputs is something you didn’t see much of 10 years ago, and it’s not only great because you can add input as you go along, but also because you can remove a defective channel in the field and replace it without losing the service of the entire console.

Each channel has continuously variable three-band equalization so that just the right amount of boost or cut in the bass, midrange and treble can be achieved for each voice or instrument. For those signals that are hotter than others, each channel has a 20dB pad to let the operator know when a channel is being overdriven. This makes it easy to spot distortion on the board, and trim the input a little bit to clean up the sound without having to search for the trouble spot. What happens when an engineer has to search for a distorted channel is usually this: by the time the engineer cranks all the channels up and down trying to find the problem, the system is out of balance, and there’s usually been some annoying feedback along the way. Something as simple to understand and use as a 20dB pad and an overload light can make the job of mixing so much easier.

Another thoughtful feature of the Series 4 is that it has three separate monitor sends. Years ago you were lucky if your mixer had one monitor send, but nowadays bands often need more than one because it is easier to hear the vocals in the monitor without hearing instruments as well. Sometimes a drummer will want to hear just the rhythm section, or the horn section might Want to hear only the horns in their monitors so that they can stay in tune with each other. There are many ways that three monitor sends can be used, and it is always good to have more than one.

The Series 4 has eight independent returns and six output busses (signal paths) that are routed through four submaster channels and right and left stereo busses. The unit has transformerless input circuitry, full provision (or multitrack monitoring} muting, 100 mm faders on all channels,

and phantom mic power. In addition, there are many options available, including reverb, expander modules and a talkback module.

The talkback module includes a + 24 volt phantom power supply which will power up to four remote units. This intercom system, which engineers and stage hands use to communicate with each other during a concert, is activated by an IC switch which also triggers the solo LED’s (light-emitting diodes) on the console. The IC switch will override the headphone switching matrix, but will mix the solo circuit when monitoring through the headphones. This system allows the use of several functions via one mic and one set of headphones, which is a more convenient way than having separate mics and headphones for intercom, talkback and solo circuits.

All this may sound confusing, but what it comes down to is this: if you start out with a mixer such as the Series 4 that is flexible and can be expanded upon, you can build a more sophisticated sound system as you go along, whereas if you buy a unit that cannot be expanded, the day will come when the band has outgrown the mixer, and you will be faced with the ugly task of trading in your mixer for a better one. So, play it smart and check out this Series 4 by Tangent Systems; go ahead and spend the money now and save yourself a lot of pain and misery by building and expanding your system from a solid foundation, rather than trying to trade in for a new board every year.