My band is ready to buy a PA system. Any advice?

We're a 5-piece blues combo, planning to do mostly parties and small club gigs. My specific questions are: Brands to avoid? She we spend money on power or quality speakers? How much power do we need? !2" or !%" speakers? How many channels do we really need, assuming we mic the bass and both guitars?

Read The Cheese Chronicles by Tommy Womack. Best book ever written about life on the road in a struggling band. Trust me

Excellent mixers and speakers. Their integrated powered mixers are excellent also, and have gotten considerably lighter. The Club series speakers are a lot of bang for the buck too.

I have an EM 150 II powered mixer that is over 20 years old and has seen a LOT of gigs and just keeps on going.

Bake

I'm looking at a 300-watt Yamaha powered mixer and 12-inch Yamaha club series speakers. Think that'd do it?

And they are road tough too. They'll easily handle 300 watts; I think they're rated for 600.

That should be adequate for the house/mains. You need to consider a separate amp for your monitors, however. The Yamaha may have 4 speaker outputs, but don't try to run the house out of one side and the monitors out of the other. Do them separately. All it requires is a separate monitor amp; your mixer will have monitor sends for each channel, for your monitor mix.

I also strongly suggest some kind of automatic feedback elimination. We use a dbx 24-filter unit on the mains, and a Behringer Shark for the monitors. Both work excellently.

Bake

Get 'em off the floor! You'll be glad you did.

You could, of course, get the 15's in the Club series, but I seriously doubt you'll ever need that. The 12's will really crank, and they're much easier/lighter to transport and set up.

Bake

If you are just doing small clubs and parties you won't need to really mic all the instruments. Some clubs will already have a system so they will set you up. Mainly you will need a system just for vocals and maybe the bass, kick drum and snare. Of course that is assuming the band can control their own amplification well enough and that is pretty easy to do.

I would suggest a powered mixer, two midrange speakers with horns and some monitors. You might need a separate amp for the monitors, but monitors are really important. If the band sounds good to each other, it is a good chance it will sound good to the audience.

There is a musicians forum here, maybe you can post there too.

Will check out the musicians' forum.

She we find yourself in any size room, you can't go wrong.

In all seriousness, what's your setup? 2 gtr, bass & drums? How many vocal mics? Any acoustic guitars or horns ever? Are you mic-ing the drums? Small clubs pretty much all have their own PA systems, and for parties, you really only need a P.A. for vocals.

That's a hell of a lot of &'s

I thought you had a )!(

Shure SM81 Condenser Mike
Yamaha 2000 Watt (800 into 8 Ohms) Stereo power amp.
DK mixing board
Lexicon MPX 200 for delay
6 JBL studio monitors

If your drummer plays a five-piece with a real basic cymbal setup (hi-hats, 20" ride, 16" or 18" crash, 18" or 20" crash, 18" china, splash, cowbell, wood block) you could be looking at anything from seven to twelve microphones just on the drumset. Let's split the difference and say ten mics--one per drum, one on the hats, one on the ride, one for each crash and one overhead mic.

You'll need ten channels on your board to handle the drum mics.

You don't have ten channels to devote to drums--if you choose a powered mixer you've only got six channels in the first place. (Which explains why you don't want one--a singer, two singing guitarists, a bassist and a drummer you need seven channels even if you just put an overhead on your drumset.)

You don't want to spend the money for ten mic cables long enough to go between your drums and your mixer.

You don't want to spend the time winding ten mic cables up at load-out.

And most important, if you need to drop the volume on the drums you don't want to have to pull ten faders.

The good pro way to deal with the problem is to buy one of those little Yamaha or Mackie 12-channel keyboard/drumset submixers, set it on a box next to the drumset, run real short mic cables from the drum mics to the submixer, then run one or two cables (with line level, not mic level, on them) to your main mixer.

But please, learn what sounds good. Idiots here at the clubs can't figure out that all the way up is not good. My BIL has a band that plays around here in Oklahoma City. Their sound men suck. The music is distorted. We wear Ear plugs anyway, but without them, it's completely distorted and you can't understand a word of what is said. Even with the ear plugs it's difficult. It sucks.
Duckie