George Mason University Indoor Drumline Team Places in World Finals with Help from StudioLive

George Mason University Indoor Drumline Team Places in World Finals With Help from StudioLive April 26,2013

[This just in from Stephen G. Mark from the George Mason University Indoor Drumline. The GMUID team just placed 8th in the WGI World Championships, and were proud as a new mom to learn that a PreSonus StudioLive 24.4.2 lent a hand. In fact, per Stephen, the teams performance was praised for the audio quality of their presentation. Footage of the award-winning performance is below. Running live sound for a drumline is a whole nother animal than running sound for the local Journey tribute band, so I asked Stephen to share some details on the hows and whats and mics. He obliged.]

Hey PreSonus! Just wanted to let you know how things went this past weekend at WGI World Championships. We came in 8th place with a 92.25. We were the only first year world class ensemble to break 90, and the only first year group to be in the top ten, an achievement that hasn't happened in quite a while.

After the awards ceremony I was told multiple times how our ensemble by far had the best balance of the entire evening. I credit being able to manipulate our sound live in aiding this accomplishment, an accomplishment that would not have been possible without the support of PreSonus.

Here's a video of our finals performance and picture from the performer's perspective of the 4,000+ audience who watched us perform and listened to that perfect sound that was praised about all night. That audience could definitely see what equipment that we are very proud to endorse.

We miked each marimba with two Shure SM-57 Mic's, evenly distributed around the individual playing zones. The vibraphones were miked in a similar fashion, but we used only one mic per instrument. We also amplified our drum set, we amplified each piece of the kit, with the exception of overhead mics for cymbals you can tell from the video that we have enough cymbal sound to fill the arena that we perform in.

We compete in various gymnasiums and arenas from February to April. Each competition site site is extremely different from one to the next, and we are given no time in that room prior to the performance. Multiple groups compete at each competition and are only given a certain allotment of time to enter the floor, perform their show, and get off the floor. Exceeding the predetermined time frame of 11 minutes can result in a penalty. So needless to say we do not get any time for a sound check! In fact, our sound check is determined by the first notes being played in the performance. In the past, while using analog mixers, we where forced to make best guesses on how the mix would sound in that room and cross our fingers and hope that would be OK. Now the StudioLive allows us to make those best guesses and if there something wrong we can adjust levels throughout the performance.

I believe having this capability allowed us to achieve an almost perfectly blended sound that was the talk of the town after our performance.

Regards,

Stephen G. Mark

LINK:	http://www.presonus.com/community/blog/index.php/2013/04/26/george-mas...
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