Description
Now that we've talked about ways to get the sound out of your guitar we need to figure out what to plug into. Even though it may not be the most relevant at this very moment in your guitar journey, I think it'll make the most sense to start out explaining what a P.A. System is and how to use it in case you ever lucky enough to get to play your acoustic guitar through one.
P.A. Is short for Public Address system and in it's most common form consists of a mixing board and two speakers. A P.A. system technically needs an amplifier too, but these days the amplifier is often built in to either the mixing board or the speakers, so you don't really see it.
P.A. Systems range from the two little shoebox sized speakers on stands and a mixing board the size of book that you might see at an outdoor birthday party for example... to the giant mixing boards and speaker systems you see at arena concerts. But it's the same basic concept: Different sources of sound, like a microphone and a guitar for example, go into the mixing board. Then the levels and sometimes the overall frequencies are adjusted and then sent out through the speakers.
In it's smallest form you can plug your acoustic guitar with a pickup straight into the mixing board and and then you hear yourself through the speakers. That could very easily be the case if you played some background music at a wedding or a BBQ for example.
Sometimes it can happen that you can't hear yourself enough from the P.A. speakers. This could be because you're playing with other instruments or simply because of how the speakers are positioned. At higher volumes, the main speakers will oftentimes be pointed away from you to avoid getting those nasty feedback screeches we all know and fear from anytime someone plugs in a microphone.
In that case you sometimes use what's called a monitor which is a speaker that's made to lie on the ground and point up towards you. This means that you can hear yourself as loud and clearly as you need and someone else can worry about what the correct level is out front. This can of course present some feedback problems, but we'll come back to that later.
The final thing I want to mention about the P.A. is that you'll sometimes be asked to plug into what's called a D.I. Box which is just a little unit that helps amplify and polish up your basic guitar signal. It can be a good thing to have if you find that you aren't getting enough volume out of your guitar pickup, but otherwise you won't really need it. And if you're lucky enough to play at a venue where you do need it, they'll almost always have one for you to use.
So to sum up the terminology from this lesson we have the P.A. System which is the mixing board and the speakers, then we have the monitor which you use to hear yourself and the D.I. Box which can be used to boost a quiet guitar signal from a sound hole pickup for example.
Lesson Info
