Marquee PA system?

[Dj Dav]

Can anyone help me out, I am organising and djing at a marquee event in July. The event is over three nights and on the Thursday and Friday night i will be using my own PA system. At the moment i have two Behringer B1500D active subs and two Mackie SRM 450's. Will this be enough or will i need more speakers? The marquee holds 700 but we are only expecting around 300 on the Thursday and Friday nights. This is the first time i have done a marquee event so i'm not sure how the speakers will sound.

[Excalibur]

Hello David, I'm sure you'll get someone qualified to advise you on this matter along soon. May I ask you to pop across to the newbies section and introduce yourself more fully. It's quite painless, and helps us to give better advice if we know something about you. Thanks.

[Dj Dav]

No problem :-)

[Creature]

You are gonna need a better rig no less than 4k ideal will be 6k, with your rig, you will be flat out and it probally still wont be enough, consider going to your loacl disco/band hire shop - they will be able to advise you the right equipment and then you can hire it in :)

if you can get your speakers up on the stage and use a high pole this may help a bit, but in marquees its a total loss on the sound unlike being in a hall were it can bounce around.

[lazersounds]

Its also worth checking any noise restrictions that may be in place for outdoor/marquee events in the area, annoy the neighbours on the first night and the council will come down on you like a ton of bricks for the other nights lol :)

[Excalibur]

Its also worth checking any noise restrictions that may be in place for outdoor/marquee events in the area, annoy the neighbours on the first night and the council will come down on you like a ton of bricks for the other nights lol :)

A consideration which also came to my mind. While I know that Creature has way more experience than I do of Marquee events, I do wonder if a rig of the size he indicated is strictly necessary. It all depends on what you're trying to achieve. It's been said before that sometimes, you only have to have adequate sound on the dancefloor.

I'm not saying that the OP's rig is necessarily big enough, ideally I'd like a little more, but the rig described is a very fair starting point.

[Dj Dav]

Would you advise putting the subs on the stage as well? Or keep them on the dance floor.

[Excalibur]

Would you advise putting the subs on the stage as well? Or keep them on the dance floor.

Now that's a good question. In a "hard" venue, you'd gain bass response by having them on the floor. In a Marquee, I'm not sure the gain would be as noticeable. The prime objective would be to get the tops as high as safely possible.

[ukpartydj]

I'm not a expert however I've done marquees with similar subwoofers and tops and I found that for around 200 people (50-100 on the dancefloor) the sound was OK but I would have preferred more.
9/10 the client over exaggerates the guest figures in my opinion. Most people I've come across that say 300 people usually have 200-250 maximum, I'd be sure to ask more questions than take it for granted though!

[Dj Dav]

There will be a proper dance floor in the marquee, it won't just be on grass. I could put the subs on the floor and the tops on the stage up on speaker stands.

I will still need more speakers though. I will ask around some other local djs and see if I can borrow or hire some.

[Jim - Scotland's Party DJ]

As people have said, it really depends what you need it for.

It sounds like it's some sort of festival event type thing?

If that's the case then yeah you'll need a sizeable rig so everyone can hear wherever they might be.

If it's a wedding I'd work on the same premise I do for indoor gigs: music squarely aimed at the dancefloor so you'll need to move much less air as you're not too bothered about music all over the place. You don't want a huge rig blasting old granny Ina who wants to sit and chat.

[Dj Dav]

It's the local gala, Peterhead Scottish Week. I have managed to call in a favour from another local Dj and got 4 subs and 4 tops. This guy has done marquees before and knows a fair bit more than me about what's required.

Thanks for everyone's help :-)

[Dj Dav]

Here's the event poster.

[Jim - Scotland's Party DJ]

Awww man TTF. My band's on at Wickerman that weekend or I'd have tried to rally some troops and make a weekend of it.

Definitely want to be going with a big rig.

[Dj Dav]

We have hired in a professional sound engineer with a big sound rig for the Saturday night so everything will be through his mixing desk.

What band are you in?

[Jim - Scotland's Party DJ]

We have hired in a professional sound engineer with a big sound rig for the Saturday night so everything will be through his mixing desk.

What band are you in?

We're called Blochestra.

Nothing too exciting, we'll be on one of the tiny side stages but we get free weekend passes.

We call it a community band whereby we practice in a pub in Glasgow every Sunday afternoon and the idea is that anyone can come along with any instrument and any level of ability to join in and be part of it. We cover a bunch of indie, rock and the odd bit of pop and usually average around 15-20 members (sometimes it's bordering on 30) There's some videos on Youtube if you're bothered enough to go looking for them :)

[Creature]

Put your bins on the stage as well. You will find the sound may be too bassy on your std settings - just knock the bass back a bit.

You want the bass to enhance and fill the sound from your mids/tops.

If sound is an issue turn bass right down or off around 11pm.

In my mind its better with marquees bookings to go out with too much RMS wattage than to little as I am often well over 100 miles plus from home with these bookings, you just cant nip back to get something better. If you have too much you can turn it down, if you have to little and are pushing your PA then sound quality can be affected, especially as the marquee wont hold any appriciable sound in at all.

If you have some actives, that you can use as monitors on the stage, this will help produce a warmer sound by the dancefloor as well.

As for only covering the dancefloor area - thats a bad idea. recently done a weekend rally in a marquee rated at 1000 people, the sound engineers only brought a 3k rig - and all weekend the punters were moaing that they couldnt hear anything, I must admit i was at the side of the stage and at times i was struggling to cue songs!

What ever solution you come up with i hope it goes well and that you enjoy and learn a lot. I find good marquee bookings with the crowd going with you are like no other booking.

My next booking luckily I'm not providing my PA its just not big enough to even offer it. Im at the farmyard party in a 3000 people huge round marquee - with just me decks n cds - its like a holiday for me :)

[super-hero]

Here's my 2 pence worth.


As has been said before. It's better to take more sound and not need it, rather than struggle with a system that's not man enough for the job.

Marquee events I've done that have bands and djs. I let the bands set themselves up, do their sound checks etc. I provide them with a monitor mix, and they provide me with a stereo mix from their mixing desk. All I need to do then is adjust their overall volume through the pa. If they are a good band they will either have their own engineer, or one of the band members will be their engineer.


Once the band have finished and it's dj time. I rotate the stage monitors round and use them as centre fills for the crowd.


If you think you might get noise complaints it may be worth having some speakers setup halfway down the marquee so you don't have the have the main speakers at full volume. Don't forget you need to add delay to these, or the sound can start to sound unintelligible.

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In the end I only needed to run 1 bass bin per side. But have 2 per side made for better stacking of the mid tops, and gave me headroom in the system if I needed it.

Hope that helps.

[Dj Dav]

Thanks for your help :-)