Concert and Festival Production

Pa Hire: short for public address hire: electronic sound amplification equipment powerful enough to reach a large audience. When enquiring about pa hire you'll need to specify what the equipment is for, where it's for and for how many people.

There are 3 main categories of use:

• Amplification of speech (conference or event)
• Amplification of recorded music (DJ set or iPod / laptop playlist)
• Amplification of live music

Indoor or outdoor?

If it's an outdoor event then you need to think about rain cover. Igoe pa hire can supply ‘pop-up' marquees for front of house mixing equipment and covered outdoor stages for performances.

What power facilities are available at the venue / site? You may need to hire a generator; Igoe pa hire can give you advice on this.

For outdoor events that only require pa hire for speech, (announcements etc) the types of loudspeakers that work best are pa horns. These look like big grey plastic trumpets. Many of them can be linked together and distributed across a large arena to cover tens of thousands of people. This is specialist pa hire kit and not the kind of equipment suited to amplifying live bands or DJ's.

Roughly how many people are going to be addressed? Obviously a pa system suitable for 50 people will be very different from one that could cater for 500. Our pa systems page can help you decide what size pa you need based on the expected number of guests.

Sound Equipment Hire

Putting on an event with amplified music is not just about renting speakers – you also need to think about sound equipment hire. If you're putting on a DJ event then you are going to need sound equipment hire in the form of Technics record decks and/or Pioneer CDJ's and a DJ mixer. There are lots of different DJ mixers from basic 2 channel scratch mixers to 6 or 8 channel installation club mixers. Check out our DJ equipment hire page.

If you are putting on a live band then sound equipment hire is essential. Firstly you'll need a mixing desk. These can have anything from 4 – 64 channels. You need to know how many instruments / vocals are involved in the band before you can decide how many channels you need. Some drum kits will require 16 channels on their own!

You'll need to hire sm58 mics for vocals; sm57 mics for horns and for guitar amps. In addition you will need D.I. (direct input) boxes for the bass guitar, keyboards and all other instruments that have a built in pick up.

To do it properly you'll also need outboard gear: gates, compressors, graphics and effects, or you can find a sound equipment hire company that can supply a digital desk like the Yamaha LS9 or Yamaha M7 CL with all the outboard built in.

Monitoring is essential for live bands. Monitors are loudspeakers that point back at the artists so they can hear themselves as they play / sing. Some performers use an IEM (in ear monitoring) system like a pair of in-ear headphones. Usually monitors come in the form of ‘stage wedges' that go on the floor. Monitoring can be done form FOH (front of house) or using an additional mixing desk and monitor engineer positioned at the side of stage.

Unless it's a small band in a small venue you're much better off getting a professional live sound production company to do the whole job instead of trying to dry hire live sound equipment and do it yourself. See our live sound page.

Sound System Hire

Companies offering sound system hire range from small scale operations stocking a few pairs of Mackie active full range speakers to major international players who could supply a massive point source system from the likes of Funktion-One or EAW; or a line array solution like the Martin Audio Longbow system. These are the kind of sound system hire companies that Glastonbury festival would need to approach with systems capable of delivering clear and full range sound to every single punter in a crowd of fifty thousand people.

Of course, whatever scale event you are planning there will be an event production company out there who can provide a sound system hire service that will be just right for you. Igoe pa hire is one of the UK's most ‘up and coming production companies with sound, lighting and staging equipment to suit any event from 50 to 5,000 people.