PA's and monitoring

Squee's thread made me think about this but I didn't want to hijack it...

Is it conceivable that a regular PA system could be used for the composition process, the way that studio monitors are?

Having been a guitarist for a couple of decades, I'm used to a mentality that your amp is part of your sound, so if you were to record anything, you'd be miking your amp, rather than running direct. Or at least that was one approach.

In electronic work, humble though my gear is, I have a very live approach- and I tend to think if my work got to the point where I wanted it recorded, I'd probably want to mic speakers and such. So would it be viable to use a PA exclusively in this case? This is presuming of course that you would compose, perform, and record all through the same system, for consistency...

monitors tend to strive for the same thing; to give out an average modest sound. pa's are all different. you need monitors to get that comfortable average. so nope.

Alas, it was as I feared. Differences in engineering, for different purposes no doubt. Same reasoning behind not monitoring on your home stereo system...

word

It would be interesting to maybe when releasing the album for home stereo use, to record the PA with a mic.

  Bubba69 said:

It would be interesting to maybe when releasing the album for home stereo use, to record the PA with a mic.

Yeah, that was my thought too. For me it's all very reminiscent of the old guitar days and band days, where you write the music and perform it, and leave the engineering up to the guy in the booth. There was also the practice of mic-ing your amp through the house PA, etc... Just one approach. Even with electronic music, this is still my approach, as I've "recorded" nothing so far apart from sequence data, so it's always pretty much "live"...

This made me think of an old thread about Boxing Day. Lol, I was totally about to write some of the same stuff here about mic-ing, but I guess I'll save WATMM the precious bandwidth. :laughing:

NO.

as in the opposite of yes.

to mixdown using carpeted shed boxes with 12 or 15" drivers would be the silliest thing a man could do with the possible exception of getting your knob stuck in your own earhole.