- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, I wanna give you six tips
to help your sound system sound better
inside your gymnasium.
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We've all been to choir performances, band performances
or small productions inside gyms,
and I think we all understand the problems.
There's large 40 foot concrete walls
that the sound bounces around
and it does not sound good at all.
It's muddy, the microphones feedback
you can barely understand what's happening on the stage,
so we put together this list of six tips
to help you get better sound inside your gym.
The first thing that you can do
to improve the sound inside your gym
is to put your stage on the broad side.
If your stage is on the narrow side of the gym
and you have speakers on either side,
those sound waves from those speakers
will go all the way down the gym, come all the way back,
it'll make this big hallway effect,
and that large delay will cause problems,
and that what adds to the unintelligibility
of the sound inside the gym.
Now, if you turn your stage,
so your stage is on the broad side of the gym,
that delay is reduced,
it might go back and forth a couple more times,
but combined with some of our other strategies
to help reduce that, it will help clean up the sound a lot.
It's the first thing that you can do
to make a big difference in the sound of your gym.
The next thing that you can do
is any type of audio treatment that you can add to your gym.
You can buy things like this off of Amazon,
we have some links in the description below,
it's quite expensive,
but if you add something like this
all the way around the gym,
that'll help absorb that sound that's bouncing around,
and that sound keeps bouncing around back and forth,
that's what adds to that muddiness
and makes it very hard to understand
what's coming out of the sound system.
Now, if you you don't wanna buy something like this,
or you don't want something permanent in the gym,
you can buy or rent, it's called volute drape.
This big heavy stage drape.
This will do the same thing,
you can get it eight, 12, 16, 20 feet tall,
you can put it either behind the stage
or on the broad side of the wall, opposite the stage,
or you can wrap your whole gym in it
depending on your budget what you're trying to do,
but this will again make a huge difference
with the sound in your gym.
It'll really eat up all that sound
that's bouncing back and forth
and make it sound a lot more like a theater than a gym.
The next thing that you can do is you can add more speakers.
This is super counter intuitive.
I have so much sound bouncing around the gym,
why would I add more speakers to the problem?
And the reason is quite simple.
Instead of having two speakers
that are cranked up to 11, blasting the whole gym,
you can add more speakers four, six or eight of them
and you can turn the volume on all the speakers down
and you point the speakers to specific regions
or specific groups of people that are in your audience.
This controls the sound
and allows you to focus the sound more on specific areas
that provides more even coverage.
When you have two speakers,
you blast the people in the front,
people in the back can't hear.
If you spread all the speakers out evenly
it gives a better distribution
and better solutions for your guests
to hear your sound more evenly throughout your gymnasium.
Now the next thing that you can do is
you can raise your speakers up and tilt them down,
so they're pointed at your audience.
If you look at a group of people from above,
there's all types of different texture there.
There's head, shoulders, jackets, closed, jeans,
empty chairs all creates a pattern
that will help absorb the sound inside your venue.
So on a speaker like this,
if you point it all the way down
and it hits that wall on the broad side,
it'll just bounce right back.
But on the bottom of the speaker,
there's two different speaker holes.
So you can actually tilt it,
so it points seven degrees down.
Seven degrees isn't much,
but it's enough so it doesn't hit that broad wall
and then you can raise a speaker up.
Now, yeah, the whole idea is to try and get the speaker.
So just hitting people,
you don't wanna point the speakers at walls.
That brings us to the next point,
instead of pointing your speakers straight ahead,
try widening them,
and then tilting them in just a little bit.
Again, this will make it
so that doesn't point all the way down
and hit the wall straight on and come back.
This allows it to maybe hit the sidewall first,
then hit the back wall, then hit the sidewall,
and between those three hits,
hopefully all the sound is gone
before it comes back toward the stage.
That's what you're trying to do.
So it's pointed down at your guests,
and it's pointed, angled in just a little bit
so it doesn't slap that back wall perpendicular,
doesn't hit it straight on so it can come right back.
The last thing that you can do,
is you can tune your sound system or tune your speakers
or tune the room,
it has a lot of different names,
but it's quite simple what you're trying to do.
Generally inside a gym, there'll be three or four
really bad frequencies.
If you have a digital audio console,
you can put a condenser mic
or something like that on the stage,
you can turn it up so starts to feed back,
make that squealing sound,
and then the digital audio console will let you know
what frequency that is,
and then you can reduce that one frequency
to prevent it from feeding back in the future.
When you do this across the three or four
different frequencies that are causing problems
and you reduce each one of those,
it'll really clean up the sound
and it'll help your sound system be much more intelligible
for your guests.
I hope these tips have been helpful.
We have some more info in the description below,
if you have a trick that you use
to clean up the sound inside your gym,
please leave a comment in the comment section below,
I'd love to hear what you do.
If you wanna see more videos like this in the future,
please like and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.