- Hi, I'm Jordan from kettner creative.
In this video, I want to show you
how I would start a brand new live sound
and audio production business with 10,000 bucks.
If you have $10,000 it's totally possible
to get all the equipment that you need to run great sound.
Now this is coming from somebody,
I built my business from the ground up
from the first speaker,
all the way up to what kettner creative is now.
We do 1400 events a year, and we run 24 seven
every single day we are fully booked.
Aside from right now we're in the corona virus.
So here I am with a warehouse full of equipment.
So I'm trying to provide good information
to people who are looking to get started right now,
off the top right now is not a good time to get started.
I might be wrong.
It could be the opposite
where it's a great time to get started.
And I'll talk about why.
Right now.
There's a whole lot of companies right
that have a massive amount of debt.
If they make it,
it's gonna drive the prices in the market down,
they're going to be so hungry for work,
that it's going to undercut everybody.
So if you're brand new,
if you just went out and spend 10,000 bucks
on a sound system, you're probably going to get underbid
by guys that have 10 15,20 years of experience
with far better equipment.
Or it could go the other way,
these companies could die.
And the pie overall pie will get smaller,
but there'll be a land grab.
And there might be an opportunity
for a new guy to come in and say,
Hey, we're brand new, and scoop up a bunch of clients.
I don't think that's the case.
I think the big guys are going to be hungry.
But I just want to put that out there.
Now if you're watching this video two years from now,
and you're thinking,
Hey, I'm looking to get started.
I do want to just put in the disclaimer
that this business does take somewhere between three
and 10 years until you're really cooking
and you have a reliable paycheck
and you have a set of equipment.
That's looking good.
There's a lot of reasons for that.
The biggest has to do with trust.
When people don't know you, that's full stop,
you're going to be done.
So it takes a long time for people to see you working.
And then they'll throw you a bone
when they're fully booked or something,
or they can't find the provider that they usually work with.
And then maybe a year later, they'll try you again.
And each time you get that test,
you have to be absolutely perfect.
Now what happened with kettner creative how we got started,
is I had a lot of live sound experience.
I grew up doing sound in the church,
but I did not try to enter this industry deliberately.
We literally fell into it.
I was filming a conference,
I knew the guy who is presenting
and he knew I was handy with a camera.
So he just brought me in to film, his keynote speech.
The live sound there was horrible,
and I had some information.
So I went up and I fixed
the feedback issue that they were having
and the client that was putting on that conference
immediately hired me for four of their events every year.
And that's the type of thing that I want to make clear
is to get started,
you really need that one little piece
that somebody threw your rope
and then you need to grab it and run.
And after that I held on to that one client
or that one client, we probably met people
and built relationships which became our first 10 clients.
And that was the backbone of which we built our business.
Now, if you don't have that,
you need to just put your name into the lottery,
you need to be seen at events you need to be around
to pick up those opportunities.
So what I would recommend is volunteer at churches,
the church tech community is very, very strong
and very connected.
if you do good work at one church,
it passes on quite a bit, and you'll have enough work there.
If you know people in a band
offered a tour with them offered to run their monitors
offered to run their front of house sound.
That's the time of thing that you need to do to get started.
And there's two schools of thought,
there's the people that say,
You know what?
Never work unless you're getting paid 25 bucks an hour.
You're better than that.
And that to those people, those people,
I've never seen those people have a business take off.
Like we're talking the Amelia Earhart story here,
the person that went in with snow ego, no ego at all,
and you need to be humble.
And yeah, you might not be making a ton of money.
You might be getting paid in beer,
you might be getting paid in burgers,
you might not even get that.
Yeah, it's hard work.
you're lifting heavy things.
But that's the type of thing
that's going to set up your career.
You need to meet people and people need to see you.
They need to see how you work.
They need to see that you show up sober,
showered and clean clothes.
All Black is best on time.
All those things have to be perfect.
All techs do in this community is they talk, okay.
So if you show up you had a beer one time
before you show up at work, something like that.
That story is seated.
Everybody will know.
And they'll take you a lot of years to overcome that.
If you show up late if you jam on an event,
as doors open or something like that.
Those are brutal things that will kill your career.
If you're trying to be a freelance guy,
or if you're trying to start your own company,
your reputation is everything.
Being half an hour to an hour early at every event,
is the best thing that you can do to set yourself up
for a good reputation.
Now, let's get into the gear
because I'm sure that's why you're watching.
But I did want to put that in.
You can buy all the gear in the world,
and it does not matter.
If people don't know who you are.
And if people don't like you,
you have to be likable.
Okay?
So if you're starting, you're going to go
through one or two tracks.
You if you're doing a lot of corporate work,
then you can get by with a lot less expensive gear.
If you're doing music work,
you're gonna be getting paid less,
and you have the bigger upfront costs.
So just be aware of that.
So if you're getting started in the corporate world,
I would still recommend the same equipment
or the same family equipment as the music world,
but you can definitely scale down.
So the first thing I would do to either track is
I would start with some lower level digital audio console.
I think it's super important
before you buy speakers to own your own console.
owning your own console buys you the freedom
to work on things at home, you can do pre mixes,
some like lower end consoles, like here, the qu 32 1624.
There's no offline editor.
So it's nice to familiarize yourself with the console
and maybe do a premix or something like that
to make sure that you're super prepared
for whatever you're about to walk into.
speakers, you can rent
and speakers take up a lot of space to store
but we're talking you have 10 thousand bucks,
how are you going to get started?
Here's what I would do.
for corporate, I would start
with a pair of plastic 12 inch speakers.
So on the Yamaha line, that means the Yamaha dx r 12.
Now, if you're scaling up from there,
the next thing I would do
is I would buy a pair of eights.
And then corporate world eights are super popular
because they're low size,
you can put them on the stage for front fill,
or you can put them in the back as delays
but they have a nice minimal concept.
The reason that I recommend starting with the 12
is because in the corporate world,
oftentimes you'll have a after party
or an event after that has music
and twelves aren't as good as the 15.
But it'll limp you until
you can afford to buy more speakers.
Now for perspective,
I can't recreate it we probably have between eight and 12
of each one of these speakers.
So they all definitely have their sweet spot
and their purpose.
But at the beginning you want to be flexible.
You want something that's modular,
the other reason to go with eight and then 12
is if you then start doing music,
now you have your monitors done.
Now with a plastic box,
you don't really need full wood boxes,
like the DSR series of Yamaha.
If you're doing corporate,
if you're doing music,
I highly recommend starting with a 15 inch,
a pair of 15 inch speakers, and a pair of 18 inch subs.
The 15 inch speakers should be a full wood box
and at least 1100 watts.
The watt ratings don't give too much credit to them.
Because it's mostly marketing,
you're not actually writing the ad 1100 watts,
you're probably running them at two or 300.
Just in case you didn't know that.
And then for the sub.
The reason I would start with 18th
is because we started with 12 and I hated it.
We started with twelves for a small corporate gig
that had a DJ and we thought it was great.
Three events later,
It was too small.
So either don't buy us up
or rent us up until you can get a proper thousand water more
18 and speaker bonus points for wheels on the back,
if at all possible, if your speaker your sub
doesn't come with them, add them on yourself.
So the d x s 18 is the Yamaha sub that I recommend.
It's I think it's their main sub right now
that they're pushing.
But we've been super happy at the bandpass design
has been awesome for DJ stuff.
Rock music out no door events.
Yeah, so back to where I would start.
The next thing is with the digital console,
I wouldn't start analog.
There's no point starting analog at this point,
you'll save maybe a couple hundred bucks right off the hop,
but it will come back to bite you
by time you want to add a compressor
or gate or anything like that
and you have all this outboard gear.
You want to travel light,
I'm assuming you don't have a big vehicle.
So digital console has all that in a size
of efficient manner.
Now, we love the Allen and he'd stuff
Yamaha has their TF line which is in the same price point.
We prefer the Allen and Heath for what it does.
Sound craft has a mixer in this price point.
The X 32 is in this price point,
whatever you like I would just recommend
if you're doing corporate,
we started with the qu 1616 Channel Mixer did a lot.
Once we started doing more music,
then we had to buy a 32.
So if you're starting out
and you're really pinching pennies,
maybe and you're doing music,
I wouldn't do less than 24 channels.
If you have this space and you have a couple extra bucks,
the 32 channel is good.
Next up, I would get a couple sm 58 and a couple sm 57
just to cover miking instruments and voices.
Most people kind of recommend
we got a killer deal on four channels of ul x
wireless for sure.
That was I think we got them for like four channels
for 1500 bucks from a gospel group
that was upgrading to ULXD,
back in the day, and that was our first four pack
and that was like they're still going to this day
that's what I have in this video just to show you
but I wouldn't go less than ULX
the bl x and all that just don't even bother
you aren't ULX?
If I was buying right now
if I was getting into the business,
ULXD it is 1000 bucks a channel it sucks to buy,
you can get them used, but they are rock solid.
We're talking 300 foot range just off the antennas.
You can use paddles with them,
you can use an antenna combiner you can scale it up and down
and it plays nice.
Almost every shop in town has ULXD,
so if you are looking to cross rent your stuff out
or if you're needing to rent more,
you have stuff that's all playing nice together.
And I think that's important.
along that same line we did just do a video
on why to buy locally.
This goes for things like cables, flight cases,
all that is super important.
Unless the community know that you're in town.
You're serious.
To when you buy Gator cases,
this one's a gator case
is one of the first ones that we got.
They're garbage.
They work really well for the first year
and you might save 50 bucks
over getting a custom one made in town.
But you will hate it,
the wheels will break in a year
and that's 100 bucks to replace it.
And then everything else starts to go the Gator cases,
just don't do it.
Don't buy your cases online, find a local manufacturer,
take your speakers in
and take your console and they'll make you a case for it
up to your spec and it'll be a little bit more
we're talking 10 or 15% more was totally worth it.
Same goes for cable trunks.
Then you can start thinking
about how you want to do your trunks with templates
and that sort of thing.
Look online.
There's lots of discussion on it.
So basically, to sum it up,
if I was getting started in music,
I'd be starting with a pair of 15s
and a pair of 18 inch subs.
That's for your mains
That's probably about 3000 bucks for that box right there.
And then either a couple twelves for monitors,
now you're up to five or 6000 2000 bucks for a console,
that's 8000.
And then you really want that last 2000
for microphones and cable.
We're playing pretty close.
The bonus points of anything you can get on wheels.
That will be a little bit outside of it.
But if you buy use,
I'm pretty sure that you could get all this
and a wicked setup for about 10,000 bucks
and then grow from there.
You can definitely rent,
until you you get to the point
that you can afford everything.
Kettner creative personally,
we we've rented a handful times,
it's never been a good experience.
We've always been in a situation
where we were able to buy the things
that we needed for the next gig.
And it's always worked out for us
a couple times a week sub rented.
We've been burnt big time.
I know that's not everybody's experience.
We're pretty unique that way
where we do not rent from other people.
But it's worked out really well for us.
A couple of Di boxes.
For the wireless we, like I said,
we bought that first four pack off the gospel group.
We got these beta at sevens,
they've been amazing to us.
Every mic we've got cents has been a beta is 87.
Just keep it all in the family for wireless handhelds.
If you're really wanting to go the extra mile,
make sure like for one of your receivers
that you also have a lapel mic,
that's a pretty common request
if you're doing a corporate gig.
And then I would say, for your own like success,
don't be afraid to get into video and lighting.
A lot of audio guys, they will grow and grow and grow.
And then they hit that ceiling
when they have their own little audio company like this.
You do need to satisfy that one shot.
That one kind of source for everything.
Clients are really looking for that dead.
Unless you go up to the really high end
unless you're working with Live Nation
or something like that.
They don't like picking best of breed,
they want one phone call to make
to hire the things that they need for their event.
I hope this video makes sense.
I hope it's not too all over the place.
If you have any questions about this stuff,
please leave a comment in the comment section below.
If you want to see more videos like this,
please like and subscribe to the channel.
I've done everything I could here
to describe the things that I would buy
if I was first getting started.
And the business side of things.
Don't go spending a lot of money
unless you really think you have that client
or that couple clients to get you through.
Because there's nothing worse
than having to store all this gear
and look at it when it's just gathering dust.
When new stuff is constantly coming out.
You want to be buying the new stuff
when you first arrive on the scene.
That way you have great equipment
that will help your reputation.
Thanks so much for watching.
And again, just leave a comment
in the comment section below.
If there's anything that you think I didn't answer,
thank you