Wedding Playback

A local couple graciously asked On the Spot Collective to play their wedding reception. The catch: only four of us could make it (Becca on vocals, Jamie on drums, Chris on guitar, and myself). This was nowhere near enough people to round out the songs we’d been asked to play, and I was already splitting bass and keys across a handful of them.

Could have I rearranged everything down to fit the sparser lineup? Probably. What did I end up doing? Dove down a rabbit hole into developing a playback system. We already knew we needed a real sound setup — this wasn’t going to be our usual street corner in Downtown Campbell — so I initially brought in my 8-channel interface to use as a mixer, connected it to my computer, and realized I had access to virtually anything a full band could produce. So I started scouring the web for multitracks and tempo mapping everything under the sun. When I hit my limit, I produced some of the tracks myself in Logic Pro.

Running everything through the interface alone started to feel limiting, though, as it only had 8 analog inputs and required virtually constant operation by a computer. So, after pondering over it for about a week, I set my sights on a real digital mixer. I landed on the Allen & Heath CQ series, which opened up considerably more inputs to work with, and the XLR outputs meant I wouldn’t have to scrape together a bunch of TRS/XLR-M cables as a one-off.

It was just about everything I was looking for: a sufficient number of inputs that I didn’t have to relegate my keyboard to mono or make a bunch of awkward microphone handoffs, USB connectivity for playback, XLR aux sends for individual IEM rigs, multitrack audio recording via SD card, and I even had inputs to spare for micing the drums to beef up sound.

Congratulations once again to the lovely couple! Thank you for trusting me and the band to celebrate your special day.