Al & GenJam have a very small footprint, especially if we can use your house sound system. Even if we bring our own sound reinforcement, we fit comfortably into a 10 X 6 foot space, and we can squeeze into 8 X 4 or a 6 X 6 corner if needed. Since Al is a quiet trumpet player, and the rest of the band can be turned down to balance Al, we can play very close to listeners without disturbing their conversations. The picture above is from the Rochester Maker Faire and shows us set up as an “exhibit” in the Rochester Convention Center using our sound system. The mic is for GenJam to hear what Al is playing and is plugged into the partially hidden pitch tracker (black box under the gray tone generator). We’re using a visualizer running on the newer computer to animate Al’s and GenJam’s notes scrolling right-to-left from the keyboard, which is great for demos, exhibits and some concerts, but not so much for most other gigs.
In larger venues, Al uses a wireless trumpet mic to bring the overall level up as high as needed. For example, we played through the sound system in RIT’s field house for as many as 3500 people at every admissions open house for over 15 years. The picture at left shows us performing on the I-Square stage at House of Guitars for Make Music Rochester. The mic receiver is the little black component with a small antenna sticking up on top of the gray tone generator and is routed both to the pitch tracker (black box under the tone generator) and a mic input on the tone generator itself so that the trumpet can be mixed with the rest of the band without a separate mixer.
To get a bit technical, for your sound system we could hand off an unbalanced line-level stereo pair to plug directly into a mixer board (as was done at HoG above) or a direct-inject box, or I carry my own DI box, which can plug into an XLR mic jack for venues with a podium mic setup going into a house system. All the tunes are mixed for stereo (setup for the Maker Faire above) but sound great when summed to mono (setup for HoG).
Al Biles 