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Drums out front?


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Doing a festival in two weeks, due to a very small stage, the promoter is considering placing the drum kit in front of the stage with the guitars and vocals on the stage. With the kit miked, I forsee a lot of bleed from the amps on stage, anyone ever seen this type of set up before?

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I have mixed a  band a couple of times where the drummer is the lead singer.  He puts his kit front and center and is flanked by the guitarist, keys, and basist.  They have their amps behind them and thus also behind the kit.  It did not seem to be a big problem to me. 

These were indoors on smallish, cavelike stages with hard walls. Even with the kit in a "normal" position, consider that the bass amp is sort of omni-directional and that a lot of volume comes out the back of many guitar cabs.  If you add in all the monitors and  the reflections off the back, side, and cieling on a stage like that, the drum mic's are exposed to a lot stray noise in most cases anyway.   

In your case, with the drummer at a level below the other performers and their amps , perhaps an amp stand or cross stage orientation for the guitar  amp would help.  Consider mic'ing the cymbals from below rather than overhead.  It might not take much to make it workable.

 

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Tomm Williams wrote:

 

anyone ever seen this type of set up before?

 

Well yes... sort-of.  It was for a Irish(?) folk music group traveling through the area (stage size was not an issue).  We had all the mics, monitors, power drops, drum riser, etc... all set-up for them.  They walked out on stage and immediately let me know "it's all wrong".  I pulled out their stage plot and said "What's wrong?"  They said "Everything"...I'd set things up conventionally with the drums toward the back.  Then they turned the stage plot over and said "It goes like this, drums at the front of the stage."  It wasn't notated what was the front of the stage... which I pointed out.  They said "Everybody knows we always set-up with the drums in the front... haven't you seen us on teevee?"  I said "I don't watch teevee."

Anyhoo... that's my drums in front story.  It sounded fine though with the drums in front... no issues there.

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Rocketface plays like this all the time; the drummer is the lead singer and have seen them in both club settings and on bigger stages. The only thing I noticed different in their setup is seeing the amps angled out to the sides more than normal and more in a center cluster where the kit would normally be. I don't know their engineer but maybe someone on here does....they are a very well known band at least around TO.

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