How to get my drum tracks louder for guitar practice , PA ?

Question

How do I get enough volume from my iPad drum tracks to match my guitar amp ? PA ? I have been practicing heavy metal rhythm guitar with drum tracks from my iPad amplified with a blue tooth speaker . It is just not loud enough to get my guitar volume past 2 on my amp . I can play as loud as. I want . I am limited by my blue tooth speaker and want to be able to crank up my guitar amp .

Was thinking of getting a PA and hooking my iPad up to the PA through the headphone jack . All my drum tracks are iPad apps . Is this a good way to go ? What size PA would I need to really get a metal level of volume ?

I enjoy practicing loud . What can I say ?

Answer 1

A decent PA would do it, and give you the possibility of plugging in microphones also, or other sound sources. If you are trying to go cheap and compact, then a keyboard amp or electronic drum amp would also work, but those are normally designed for a single sound source.

You'll want a lot more watts in your PA or keyboard/drum amp than your guitar amp, because for drum sounds you need headroom and also more low frequency extension, both of which require more power. You should shoot for 200 Watts or more (total across the whole system), depending on what you can afford.

If you want to go the PA route, I'd get a 6 - 12 channel UNpowered mixer and two powered speakers. The advantage in powered speakers is you don't have to take a lot of time matching power amp to speaker cabinets. I'd look for powered speakers with at least a 12" woofer (if not 15") and 100 - 200 Watts each speaker.

For a keyboard or drum amp, I'd look at 12" designs with 200 Watts or so of total power.

Oh also, you'll need a way to get the sound from the iPad into the PA or amp. The cheapest way is find the right cable to go from the headphone jack but I can say from experience it won't sound as good as the best way. The best way is to get an iPad compatible interface (if it's "Core Audio Compliant" it will work even if it doesn't say iPad on it) and an iPad camera connection kit if it's a USB interface.

Answer 2

It does depend on how loud you mean by loud. For the purpose of practice, anything that makes your ears ring after playing might seem cool now, but take it from someone who can't hear that well anymore and has constant ringing in their ears because of loud music (I think it was a Pantera, or possibly dream theater concert that did it in the mid 90s) I would consider carefully your playing volume. Do the research, hearing damage isn't like the volume going down, it wrecks frequencies so you hear some things well and other poorly.

That was a bit of an aside, but otherwise, I completely agree with Todd's answer, although also, it might be worth taking a look at a powered wedge monitors. Due to the position, you will likely need less volume to hear it well, and you don't need to worry about hooking up mixers to speakers (not that it's very hard, but the wedge would be closer to a guitar amp).

Also, as you can still run your ipad through it, if you pick up an irig or similar, it may also come in handy for running things like amplitube through your ipad in case you have a friend over and want to jam, you can use your amp/wedge set up as a faux guitar amp. Of course, you could also do this through a PA set up too.