using separate mixer for drums live

[crabby]

i have seen this done before,just beginning to learn sound for myself,is it easier to run a separate mixer for drums on stage then send it back to the board? pros? cons? do the pros do this or not?

[blinz]

I do this when our drummer uses his acoustic kit (normally uses a Roland kit) but only because the rack mounted board we normally use doesn't have enough channels. When our sound is run from out front, the sub board is out there too. I run the stereo outputs from the sub board into one of the stereo input channels on the main board. Works perfectly. Gives me a master fader on the main board for overall drum volume or I can tweak individual channels on the sub mixer.

 

I would set it up wherever your main mixer is located unless you absolutely can't due to running out of snake channels or some other reason.

 

I would think most pro sound companies would have enough channels on their main board to not need to do this, but I guess you never know.

[agedhorse]

Terrible idea in general because there's no way for the drummer/submixer to know what it really sounds like out front. It's a Bandaid at best.

[blinz]

 

I would set it up wherever your main mixer is located

 

 

That being said, our main board is not always out front. There are many gigs where we have to run our own mix from the stage. In those cases, I use a wireless with my bass and go out front and check the mix and come back and tweak it. But we don't use acoustic drums for those gigs anyway which means we don't need the extra channels. Such is the life of a gigging 4 piece band...