Hey, is anybody gigging, in medium spaces in stereo? The motif is so great in stereo, I hate not taking advantage of it, but it never sounds right coming from FOH. Any tips on getting the best sound live?

Nevermind, I read all of the previous posts on this. But maybe you guys can shed some light. I heard a big band gig recently that had a Fender Rhodes on it, using tremelo. It seemed to fill up the room no matter where we were sitting, no phase issues. Im just looking to recreate this for the audience of a slightly bigger space. The PA speakers are too far apart. Could I hook up two speakers near the keys and reproduce the effect for the audience? How should they be placed?

Finally found time to respond to this.
I have been gigging in stereo for nearly 10 years now.  I dispensed with all the “OMG you’ll get PHASING” tripe.  Yeah...you might get phasing in certain instances, but for most of the venues *I* play at, we’re either in a small to medium room, or we’re in an outdoor space that doesn’t have a huge depth to it. 

Therefore, I actually not only record every instrument and microphone to a Zoom R16, but I pan things such that what we hear in our ears is (or should be!) EXACTLY what FOH is getting and the panning of microphone/instrument (for example, my microphone and my keyboards) matches what the audience both “sees” and “hears”.

This not only gives us some space in our in-ear mix (and thus I can “hone in” on my vocals or my keyboards, or even the guitarist’s guitar), but it quite literally visually matches what the audience is seeing to what they’re hearing.

Typically, if you are in the audience looking at us, you’ll see the following:
Guitarist on the left
Female vocalist in the middle
Keyboardist (me) on the right

Therefore, in our in-ear mix as well as our FOH mix we have:

Guitar - mono - panned left 40
Guitarist vocal - mono - panned left 40
Female vocal - mono - panned center
Keyboard vocal - mono - panned right 40
Keyboards - stereo - panned right 60 (to offset the “stereo-ness” of it)
Drums/Bass - stereo - centered (although the various parts of the drum “kit” are of course spread around the stereo spectrum).

We’ve been doing it this way for the band Baja Dunes for going on 2 years now and we actually get comments from average folks (who know nothing about sound) as to “how great it sounds out here...everything is clear and clean and in its place”.

We have been using JBL Eon 15” powered speakers for main FOH, but we’ve been flirting for 5-6 gigs now with using Yamaha HS80M studio monitors for the smaller rooms and the clarity has INCREASED with the use of the HS80M’s, although in my opinion, the experiment is over, the HS80M’s “win” for small/medium rooms, BUT, I’m sick of dragging them out of my studio every time we gig.  So it’s back to the JBL’s for now.

Maybe Yamaha powered mains or QSC’s in our future...don’t know.

Anyway...I cannot and will not go back to mono for EITHER the FOH mix or the in-ear mix.

If we didn’t use in-ears, I would STILL have some aspect of stereo speakers on stage for my monitoring (I have some Behringer keyboard amps that would work nicely for that).

You simply lose TOO much in terms of all the effects that Rhodes/Wurly, B3, and Analog synths can make use of (not to mention simple acoustic piano sounds much more spacious and real when stereo vs. mono).

So there’s my opinion!

Sincerely,

Kevin B. Selby
http://kevinselby.com <-- Peaceful Music
http://facebook.com/BajaDunes <-- Live Performance