When having a venue in a pub, the usual holding capacity for it is around 50-200 people, a medium venue, for example a nightclub club would be slightly bigger and have a capacity of around 350-450. A large venue could have a capacity of around generally 4,900-5,000 people.
Speaker wise for a mall venue you would usually have minimal front of house speakers or even if the venue was that small you wouldn’t need speakers.With a medium sized venue such as a nightclub you may need front of house speakers as well as speakers that face outwards to each side away from each other. A large venue would usually need speakers at front and back of house so you could project all the sound around the room.
If you was going to have lighting in a small venue you would need minimal equipment maybe just a few spotlights on each band member or if there was just a singer have one spotlight. In a medium though there may be some lights of different colour in the back to make it look cool whilst there is a spotlight on the main band/ singer. A large venue would usually have many strobe lights and main lights usually shining on the band that are preforming, the audience may also film it with a flashlight on and from the stage point of view you would see many lights in the distance.
For my small venue I have chosen the Two Brewers in Chelmsford, you would be able to fit a small band in there or a small DJ set because it can only fit around 50-80 people in there, speaker wise you would need at lest two large speakers if you was a DJ/solo act but if you had a band in there there would be no need for any speakers, however small strobe lights would liven the place up.
For a medium venue I chose KoKo Camden as I have been there, their capacity is around 1,400 you would be able to fit a band in there and you would need to have 2 large front of house speakers, and 2 monitor mixes one for the drummer, one for the singer and one for each of the guitarists. This would be better for the bands overall performance because with the monitor mixes you can make every instrument go through the speaker and you could have the right levels for everyone. The lighting rig would be rather large as it’s not particularly a small venue as it has a large capacity.
For the large venue I chose to do the O2 arena. Although I’ve never been there I did my research on the place and found the capacity is 20,000 people. There would at least be 10 front of house speakers because the capacity is so high. As the O2 is so big there would be many monitor mixes for the band and many mic’s would be in use to capture every inch of the performance. For the lighting within the 02 the set up would be huge because you would want to fill every inch with strobe lights and you would want a spotlight big enough to cover the star/ band performing.
Jack Day 