About us

photo by Martin Bosker / Slightly-tilted

This blog will document our journey in the wonderful world of sound engineering. We are a folk band name The Gonnagles and are with 12 people playing (current count) cajons, other percussion, bass, cello, guitar, harp, accordion, button accordion, clarinet, trumpet, flugelhorn, saxophone, flute, violins, alto-violin and four vocals. We only play for fun, since there is no real money to be made with so many people. This means that we spend the money we make on things that increase our fun.

Sound engineering is an important aspect of our fun. With good sound, we have nice gigs and everybody is happy. Also, Gijs, Edwin, Jan and Frank are (part-time) sound engineers, which gives us many options. First, Gijs and Frank will be doing Front of House sound by alternating each other, so they also get to play some songs wit the band. Second, we have the ability to invest in sound equipment that allows us to play gigs we think are fun to do without any problems with the equipment that is or is not available.




We've recently invested in many nice microphones (the violins now play with DPA 4099 for example), and invested in a very cool speaker system (I'll write about this some other time). However, the cabling, multicore, mixer and outboard are of bad quality and can no longer meet our expectations. This means that we are now thinking really hard on a quality replacement that gives us the most fun in playing and using. We are also thinking really hard on new cabling for the stage, using a mixture of stage snakes and new XLR cables.

This blog will document our attempts, failures and successes in our journey to good sound and fun gigs. It might contain some information that is useful to other bands and engineers. It will certainly help us to keep track of what we are trying to do.