How to organize a student's concert, 3rd part. At school.

And how is a concert at school organized? In that case we'll need more equipment since there are many students. You could use a small mixing desk like this one. It's not so expensive. You can connect several microphone and guitar "jack" cables and send the mix of all these instruments to the speakers.

It's so easy to use! You can equalize and amplify several instruments with it (3 or 4, more than that are too many) and give more volume to those who are playing the most interesting part at the moment.

In the first two channels (marked with the numbers 1 and 2) you may plug a microphone cable or a guitar cable, the rest are only for jack cables. The input volume (or gain) it's marked in blue. It makes the voice or leader guitar "come in" strongly and sound more, but if you rise it too much it makes white noise ("ffff" like the old TVs) To highlight this channel is better to rise the volume step by step: rise a bit the input volume and a bit the output volume (marked in orange). Also...

... you can see the inputs for the instruments marked in green in this photo. The first two inputs (top left of the photo) you may connect a microphone cable (as the one you can see on the photo below) or a guitar cable. Then there are more inputs: the "3/4", "5/6" and "7/8", so you can connect 8 instruments to this mixing desk although it's too much.

This mixing desk may be used by a soloist (=a musician who plays alone) or a singer with a guitar or a rock band who is starting to purchase the equipment and needs to give a concert indoors (like in a bar) so they don't need to amplify the drums. A band could plug on input 1 and 2 two microphones or a mic and the leader guitar. And then connect three more instruments like another guitar, the bass, may be an harmonica or place a "general mic" for the drums although to amplify it well to play in an open air concert, it's necessary to use several microphones and this mixing desk is too small to connect all that.

The output volumes of each channel are marked in red. You can regulate the volume of each musician with those and rise the most important part at the moment. The best would be that somebody is in charge of the mixing desk during the concert.

You can see marked on yellow the general output volumes and in blue the places to connect the headphones and the amplifiers ("main) to send the mixed sound.

And this is a microphone and its cable.

Microphones are not only used for singing, they are also useful to place them on a stand in front of an amp to connect to a mixing desk to send the sound to some very big amplifiers to give an open air concert.

This cable's ends are different than the ones in guitar's cables. In the center of the photo is the edge that goes into the microphone. When keeping the microphone, the cable separates from it. Likewise guitar's cables, these cables damage after using them for some time, especially the connections inside the edges and it's necessary to replace it for a new one. But microphones endure much longer.

You can also connect a mic to a guitar amp with this other cable on photo below. It connects to the mic as the other cable before mentioned but the other end is a jack. The amp has to be in the clean channel when using the mic although you may use a bit of reverb or echo. 

I like this type of microphone stand since it has many possible combinations and you can even place two mics.

There are some stands that only have the holder marked in red and they are used to sing. This holder could extend or reduce depending of the person's stature.

But the other holder that this stand has (marked in green) has many possibilities since you can rotate it and place the mic down in front of the amp or place it in front of a guitar when playing seated, amplifying a voice and an acoustic or classical guitar. In this other photo...

.. you can see you may place a microphone in front of your amplifier to pick the sound and send it to a mixing desk as I said before. To do that you need a microphone stand of that type, a microphone, a long cable and the mixing desk. (To be continued...)