BRUCE LAMONT: Hi. I’m Bruce Lamont. Happy to be here with Gearwire, and today we’re going to discuss the trials and tribulations of amplifying acoustic based instruments. I play saxophone in the metal band, Yakuza, so I deal with this on a daily or a weekly basis.

[BRUCE LAMONT PERFORMING WITH YAKUZA]

Amplification has become a necessity. Attempting to blow saxophone over electric guitars, bass guitars is just not going to happen.

[BRUCE LAMONT PLAYING A SAXOPHONE LICK]

Some of the problems that we’ve been dealing with as far as amplifying instruments such as saxophone, at least I found, you need -- obviously we need a microphone of some sort to amplify the sound as well as being able to control the tonality of that. I have a Mackie line mixer that has a five-band EQ equalizer on that, and the EQ well basically we’ll utilize to try to create the fullest tone possible for the saxophone as well as to try to fight off like feedback. When having an open, ambient mic such as this, you have to take into account the size of the room and what-not and may cause feedback to occur.

[BRUCE LAMONT PERFORMING WITH YAKUZA]

Mic placement, depending on where you are on the horn and the dynamic range of the mic itself, how wide of a frequency band it will pick up layered with. Once we’re talking like about the effects or what-not that will also come into play as far as feedback. Right now I have everything flattened out at zero on the EQ, so this should generally be rather -- one would call it a natural sound but basically natural to the microphone.

[BRUCE LAMONT PLAYING A SAXOPHONE LICK]

So, you’re trying to amplify the horn loud enough to combat against these other instruments that I was mentioning before, so.

[BRUCE LAMONT ADJUSTING EQ USING HIS MACKIE LINE MIXER]

So, I just rolled off a ton of low end. I used -- This is a very simple EQ on the channel itself which is high and lows which basically like brings up or brings down -- I have like 80 Hz on the low and 12 kHz on the high. I’ve rolled the 80 Hz almost all the way off. In the high end, I brought up a little bit. Now you can hear a different feedback tone here when I bring up the high end.

[BRUCE LAMONT ADJUSTING EQ USING HIS MACKIE LINE MIXER TO DEMONSTRATE FEEDBACK ELIMINATION TECHNIQUE]

Start to. There you go. I’m going to roll that back. Now also, say I place the horn...

[BRUCE LAMONT POSITIONS SAXOPHONE BELL OVER MICROPHONE]

...over the microphone, and so this also becomes problematic. You’re getting different types of feedback. There it is. So, we’re trying to avoid all that, so I’m going to bring the volume level down, I’m going to EQ this out so it sounds good again, and here we go.

[BRUCE LAMONT PLAYING A SAXOPHONE LICK]

So basically, you’re trying to -- If you’re going for, you know, an extreme volume or as much volume as possible, you want to bring this up and then that’s where you start to sort of you’re starting to combat the feedback issues that will occur with this increased volume.

[BRUCE LAMONT PERFORMING WITH YAKUZA]

Again, with the feedback issue, I was utilizing just the high and low EQs on the actual channel of this mixing board, but this also has a five-band EQ where you can actually hone in a bit more on particular frequencies that can be the problematic or not, and while this board has seen better days, three of the five faders are broken, so for me to bring up and down certain frequencies I’ll have to talk into this.

This is kind of hot so I’m going to bring down some of the 3k, tu-tu-tu-tu, too, too, too, too, and the 12k so there’s less high end. Let’s roll off the low end, 250 Hz as well as 60. Bring up a little more. Tsk, tsk, tsk. There we go. The larger the EQ, the more detailed you can get with the frequency choices. That’s it.

GRETCHEN HASSE: Okay.

BRUCE LAMONT: Except let me get the knife.