What PA did Cliff (and Shadows) use in old days?

[dave robinson]

Would there be any advantage to playing in a venue for 250 people or so without micing the amps? That's an appealing idea to me, but I realize the acoustic guitar would go through the PA and usually the bass guitar too, so that leaves only the lead amp.

Andy

As most of our gigs are up to only about 400 people these days, we never mike up the amps, we do it the old way as Cliff and The Shads used to do, but we carry our own PA as well as the backline, with the acoustic guitars going through there own acoustic amps. On rare occasions I put a kick and overhead on the kit. It has proved successful and our audiences love it. Over the last twelve years or so whilst being on this scene, I have rarely heard a sound engineer get it anywhere near 'right' at any of the events I have played on or visited. The exception being a couple of times at Shadowmania 2005/2006. Even on the Shadows concerts of 2004/5 I think that the sound overall was 'acceptable' at best. 99% of punters complained about the bass being intrusive and Hanks guitar sound being wooly.
It is difficult to find an engineer with 'ears' these days, they are mostly bass heavy knob twiddlers.

[rogera]

I think that you're 'spot on' with your last sentence Dave.

[Bojan]

Would there be any advantage to playing in a venue for 250 people or so without micing the amps? That's an appealing idea to me, but I realize the acoustic guitar would go through the PA and usually the bass guitar too, so that leaves only the lead amp.

Andy

As most of our gigs are up to only about 400 people these days, we never mike up the amps, we do it the old way as Cliff and The Shads used to do, but we carry our own PA as well as the backline, with the acoustic guitars going through there own acoustic amps. On rare occasions I put a kick and overhead on the kit. It has proved successful and our audiences love it. Over the last twelve years or so whilst being on this scene, I have rarely heard a sound engineer get it anywhere near 'right' at any of the events I have played on or visited. The exception being a couple of times at Shadowmania 2005/2006. Even on the Shadows concerts of 2004/5 I think that the sound overall was 'acceptable' at best. 99% of punters complained about the bass being intrusive and Hanks guitar sound being wooly.
It is difficult to find an engineer with 'ears' these days, they are mostly bass heavy knob twiddlers.

Sorry Dave, I am not familiar with some of the expressions you used -- and I am very interested.
When you say that you put a "kick and overhead on the kit" I assume that you mean that you place a mike on the bass drum and over the entire drum kit. Is that correct? What do you mean by "backline" . . . would that be the rhythm section, ar just the bass and rhythm?

[noelford]

My own band, in the mid sixties, was mainly doing support work for many of the 'name' bands of the time. Miking-up was pretty much unheard of in those days, but bands frequently used their own PAs rather than rely on house systems for vocals. I remember a gig at King's Hall Stoke-On-Trent, a huge venue packed absolutely solid. We were supporting Brian Poole and the Tremeloes that evening and after we closed the opening set, Brian Poole approached us and asked if they could use our PA because, in his own words, 'ours is rubbish'.

[RogerCook]

Modern practise seems to be to run most everything through the PA. In the 60s I remember plugging the vocal mics into spare channels on the guitar amps!

An advantage of running through the PA is that it can reduce the stage volume enabling players to hear themselves and each other. "Lead" guitar amps are usually pretty directional and may be hard for the other band members to hear. If you have foldback the sound can be played back to the band through stage monitors or in ear monitors and in the more sophisticated systems each performer can have a mix tailored to suit them. If you fully mic a drum kit you would use 6 or 7 mics requiring 6 or 7 channels on the mixer for drums alone, plus whatever else you need for the other instruments, vocals etc. So you need lots of channels! A more modest approach would be to just reinforce whatever is needed by running those specific instruments through the PA (as Dave suggests, kick drum and probably a pair of mics over the drum kit to pick up cymbals and general ambience).

Depending on how sophisticated your gear is and how big the venue is, you might delay the front of house speakers by a few milliseconds so the sound coming direct from the backline (ie the acoustic sound of the drums and the instrument amps) reaches the audience at the same time as the sound from the PA speakers which are positioned at the front of the stage (in front of the vocal mics to avoid feedback). Amps with a line out facility can be DI'd to the PA but with the loss of whatever qualities the amp's speakers impart to the sound. Then there's what mics to use, where to position them, etc ...

Hope that's some help

Roger

[noelford]

When my band was reunited for a couple of charity gigs in 2004, a sound-engineer friend offered to mic us up. We turned the offer down, preferring to play the way we did back in the sixties. It was a good decision and we had two great nights, packed houses and excellent sound right through the venue (which was, admittedly, rather smaller than King's Hall).

[RayL]

To get a picture of why PA setups in the UK were so primitive in the early 1960s, you have to remember that most of the places that The Shadows played were old theatres and halls, built between about 1850 and 1914. They probably only had one power socket on stage, and that might have been one of several different types (3-pin 2A, 2-pin 5A, 3-pin 5A, 3-pin 13A, 3-pin 15A, Dorman-Smith 'fused-pin', etc) so so it meant carrying adaptors, or wedging the bare ends of the mains cable (often two core, no earth) in with matchsticks.

As far as the theatres were concerned, one microphone, a 10 or 15 watt amplifier and a couple of column speakers either side of stage would have been all that was needed for the comedians and solo singers that needed amplification before the groups came along.

Groups then started to carry their own PA but it was still columns, usually 4 x 10". A pair could be carried by one person, provided someone else held the doors open. However, a strong-wristed drummer could still drown out the rest of the group.

With the advent of Jim Marshall's fixed-bias guitar amps in the mid-60s and the 'Marshall Guitar Stack' that needed 8 x 12" in two cabinets to handle 100w (because the speakers were only rated at 15w), the PA columns also became 4 x 12" and drummers began to get drowned out. Arbiter's Hayman kit was the 'acoustic' answer - coating the insides of the drums with hard reflective paint to make them louder.

The breakthrough came in about 1969 with the UK tour of the American band Iron Butterfly, who brought over their own PA, which used 'Cinema W' bins - essentaily wide-response cabinets that used acoustic design to make the loudspeakers work more efficiently. So great was the interest that they sold the system and left it behind on their return to the USA. Gradually, 'bins and horns' took the place of the columns, to be superceded in turn by today's multiple arrays.

That was the point where 'mic'ing up the drummer' became feasible and ushered in the modern concept of mic'ing up the whole band.

Ray

[Bojan]

Great information . . . thanks everyone!!

[neil2726]

I can relate to Noels comments on the Kings Hall at Stoke. We did this venue several times in the 70/80s and used our own PA - a H&H 100watt amp through 2 home made cabinets - 2 x 12" and a horn in each. We never mic up the amps or drums! We also did Trentham Gardens a few times which was much bigger than the Kings Hall, once backing Mikki and Griff, a well established country duo/recording artists, with the same set up. Interestingly the home made speaker cabinets were obtained from a Pro band The Hillsiders who were doing lots of TV/Radio/touring at that time, which shows even Pro bands had basic Pa s in those days!

[Bojan]

But what about echo devices used for vocals? Surely the singers and groups of the late fifties and the sixties did not sing without at least some echo or reverb. After all, there were so many good PA systems around at the time, with fabulous tape echoes; in fact most of the Meazzis and Binsons and others were made for PA rather than for guitar. If Hank paid so much attention to the echo patterns and built his entire sound around the Meazzi echoes, I would have thought that singers, especially famous ones like Cliff and Marty Wilde, not to mention the groups that came a few years later, would be so indifferent to that type of voice enhancement to totally ignore how their voices would sound and had to to depend solely on what kind of PA each venue had, or if that PA even worked or not. What about the groups: Beatles, Stones, Animals, Searchers, Dave Clark Five, Hollies, Them, Kinks, Who . . . It is difficult to comprehend that they did not use their own PA systems with echoes for vocals, because on recordings there was definitely echo added to the voices. I think the Dave Clar Five had a lot of echo in the voice. Finally, all those groups had to practice somewhere, so they must have had some PA systems of their own. I can't beleive they paid so litle attention to such an important aspect of their overall sound.