Pricing Question

[SpaceNorman]

This past weekend - I had my first gig with a new project that I recently got involved with. We played a beer tent at municipal festival. Good weather and cheap beer contributed to making it a good night. My guess is that we had a crowd of more than a 1,000.

 

Unfortunately, we struggled with sound issues all night long - which hurt both the quality of our sound - as well as took our minds off of performing which didn't help in the least. Although I'm just a side man in this project and along for the ride - I came away having learned something.

 

My regular act has a couple of large beer tent gigs coming up in September - that will involve larger tents, larger crowds. Based on my experience this past weekend - I realized that there's no way my existing rig is going to cut it in these big tent venues.

 

My current rig consists of appropriately powered Yamaha Club SW118 subs and Yamaha Club V 15 and horn tops (1 sub and 1 top per side). It's all mixed from an Allen & Heath Mixwiz 16:2 along with a couple of DriveRack PA units and a simple effects unit that's set in a "FOH" rack that's all hardwired to mix from stage - with a couple of 30' splitter snake drop boxes.

 

We're a 6 piece (bass, drums, guitar, keys, sax and female vocalist) in which everybody sings. Given the venues we play - we typically don't fully mic the drum kit (we usually run a little kick drum in the PA and that's it).

 

While my rig works great for most of the gigs we play - it's not going to deliver for the couple of large beer tent gigs we've got coming up. I'm giving serious thought to simply out sound for this these gigs - which leads me to my question. My bandmates want to simply augment our existing stuff with some "extra" cabinets and a little more power. I'm not crazy about the idea - because it will end up being a kludge of cabinets ... and require that I screw around with my pre-wired racks to integrate it for a single night. I'll also be stuck having to deal with it and babysit it to keep it running all night long .... from stage. Screw that - I'd rather job it out.

 

What should I expect to pay to rent an adequate PA? I'm thinking a couple of appropriately powered subs and tops a side, 24 channels worth of mixer, monitors (4 floor wedges with a generic vocals mix) plus a signal send to the vocalist provided IEM and a "signal only" monitor send to the keyboard mixer - along with a sound guy to run it - will meet my needs.

[tlbonehead]

Somewhere in the $250-300 range will get you a part-timer with a little setup like that, at least around here.