I play the tuba in marching band. I have to face the fact that the tuba does not have enough fundamental note to fill out a marching band.
I was thinking that we could build a subwoofer with continuous possible output around 75dB in a college football stadium, 90dB in a high school stadium, 100dB for the people in the front of the stands, 120dB for the poor people in the pit down to 20hz with a peak of 130dB (add 10dB to all the figures) at 20hz.
The band itself is small enough that you could support the band more than enough with this subwoofer. You would put a synthesizer in the pit, hook it up to both its own amp and the subwoofer to have output in the full range. The synthesizer could then have its own part it plays which provides the fundamental frequencies to make the band sound absolutely huge and awesome compared to without it.
I was at a marching band festival Saturday and I saw two giant bands that had a synthesizer supporting the band and it sounded great. The only thing was they had 10dB less output and only to 80hz or so. It filled out the band a lot.
Play a techno-like song such as Zombie Nation - Kernkraft 400 or a song with deep modulated bass (maybe Madonna haha) and play it with the subwoofer boosted more than normal making sure you're getting a lot in the region of 20-40hz. Then turn the sub off. A lot's missing, right? Yeah...
I think it'd make a huge difference in our band's sound. We could mic the concert bass drum and gong in along with the synthesizer, but only amplify the region below 50hz on the bass to add in the POWER factor as they can clearly hear the higher frequencies anyway.
We have parts in our music which really take advantage of the gong/bass combination.
If we could build a sub from a Fi Q18 and weatherproof it for maybe $800 amp and all, that'd make for an awesome show musically. My director was talking about the "POWER" some bands had in their sound (the ones with synthesizers and large bass drums).
I might ask about it. *MIGHT*
I just like the idea of a powerful sounding 80 person band. Oh.. I have band practice in about 3 hours I better sleep.