Seems you didn't understand the point I was making. The things you are trying to claim are "unique" about jazz - "originality", "not sounding like other musicians" - are not unique at all to jazz. They are inherent in all genres of music, including the popular music that you say you are "glad you don't play".
Keys amplification
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JBLs are good. Particularly the old-school, passive stage monitors and mains, which have outstanding sound.
Covers are a big part of jazz. In fact, most of jazz is playing covers with space for individual improvisation and arrangement. You yourself just mentioned a mashup of So What and Autumn Leaves. In my band we do a mashup of I Will Survive and Flowers. I don't see any difference between what you are doing and what we're doing.
I’m a former Hammond/Leslie lifter, now reduced to a more elderly-friendly set-up.
I still carry hundreds of Lbs of gear, but it’s split up, so is more manageable.
I use a Nord Stage 3 on a generic folding table stand, and an X-style folding seat. With a bungee they fit on a Gruv-Gear 500 hand truck in lean-to mode. (The hand truck is heavier than the Nord).
My 2nd load, the hand truck now in “U mode”, holds two QSC 10s and a Hohner 48 bass accordion bag (the best cord & accessory bag I’ve ever used). The cord bag is heavy, but do-able, holds all connections, spare crap and a mixer, too).
I run the QSC 10s in stereo, stacked behind me, aiming the top one a bit off center from the bottom one, with an Allen/Heath Zed 6 mixer on top. (I added rubber strips to keep things from sliding). I keep a QSC 8” in the car, stick it right next to me if the room is large (just vocals in our PA). At concert venues I’ll use a house monitor (and sometimes a Hammond: Ahhh).
All my stands, speakers and cord bag fit behind the back seat of a Honda CRV, with the Nord on top.
I’m too old at 69 to be humping even this “easy” set-up on cold late nights- and it takes longer than a Hammond to set-up and break-down once inside. Still, the music itself, and my ball busting musician pals, keep me young-at-heart.
I switched out some of the black Nord knobs for easier (cooler) visual, and changed the 3 so it reads “Nord Stage 8” on top. So don’t brag to me about your NS4, folks!
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We just did a show at a new venue this past Friday. The club said that we could use their sound system and that we just needed a mixer, monitors and cords/mics. The sound system was two JBL PRX One line arrays (bass module and stick setup). 5 piece band sounded fine. Here is video, you can see 1 of them on the right at about 1:12 in the video. Not sure if the permissions to see the video are ok or not ....
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That's good to hear -
Cuz my experience with them is that using 1 of those "stick" things as a PA can't cut it for a band situation - although you say there were 2 of them, right?
Interesting - where were they physically located... behind the band, in front of the stage or off to the side somewhere? -
...wait, never mind I see it in the video, located far Stage Left at the front edge/lip of the stage.
However -
Because you added your own monitors, you were not really using those line arrays the way they are marketed - to be the "only" speaker/sound source on the stage.
Is that how line arrays are marketed? I never heard that. It doesn't make much sense. You want your on-stage volume and mix to be separate and independent from the what the audience hears.
Line arrays can definitely crank. I've never used them personally but I heard a DJ using an HK Audio Polar recently at an outdoor wine tasting event and they sounded good.
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It's how Bose markets it (or at least, how they have in the past). They actually want each player to have his or her own. ;-)
At lower levels, it actually does work, to have one or two of them placed so that both the audience and band are hearing them, with no additional monitors needed, since the design is resistant (but not impervious) to feedback.
If you have a soundperson out at FOH, then yes, that's typically what you want, that's the pro approach. One person is out front creating the right mix for the house from the mains, while the band members get their own monitor feeds that emphasize what they want to hear.
However, there are cases where the band is "mixing from the stage," and in that case, it is actually beneficial for the stage mix and the house mix to be the same. Unless maybe you've got someone on stage who is being fed the house mix from some speaker or IEM. But absent that, separate mixes are a problem. For example, left to their own devices, each singer may want to hear their voices over other people's voices, which is fine if soeone is out front balancing the voices for FOH. But if nobody is actively balancing the FOH mix, instead of having each singer hear themselves as the loudest voice, I think it's better for all the vocalists to be hearing the same mix as the house, so they can properly balance themselves depending on who is singing lead and who is singing backup on a particular song.
Oh geez, so they want you to have, like, 7 line arrays up on stage?
Well, I mix it from stage in my band, and the two are definitely different. My drummer doesn't want any guitar in her monitor, she wants mostly singers and some keys. The guitarist doesn't want any keys at all and the lead singer's monitor is near him, so I have to reduce keys in there. For my monitor I want only myself (keys) and the singers,, I don't want any guitar. This on stage mix is totally different than the mix I'm sending to the audience. The mix I send to the audience is a balanced mix.
I've been with this band for 2 years and I know how we should sound. I actually do a better job of the house mix than some of the "pro" places where we play.
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I'm glad you got that method to work for you, but it didn't work for us. We used to do it that way, where for example the various vocalists on stage had the mixes they want, but with no one out front managing the main mix, if we listened back to a FOH recording of the gig after the fact, we'd find that balance among the vocals could be unpredictable, probably more so as the night progressed. That particular problem may not come up as much if there's always one lead vocalist and the others are always harmonies, but if the same singers could be singing lead or backup depending on the song, it gets more complicated.