The Sound & Light Hire Company Logo

Every week across London, Surrey and Hampshire, there are events graced with the presence of a live band to get party guests, wedding attendees, or festival-goers on their feet and dancing. While undoubtedly a lot rests upon the talent of the musicians, no live band can successfully perform without suitable sound equipment.

High-performance sound equipment that accentuates every thump of the bass and delivers crystal clear vocals is crucial to your wowing your audience. However, your equipment requirements will likely span far beyond merely those related to sound. Stage hire, lighting hire, and even a dancefloor might be required to provide the immersive experience you’re looking for.

Whether you’re an event organiser investigating hiring a live band, or you perform as part of a live band yourself, let’s take a look at what you might look to hire to deliver your best possible performance.

Live Sound Equipment Hire

Those of you involved in the performance and events industry will already be aware of this fact, but live sound hire is a different beast to your traditional sound system hire. Live bands have all kinds of additional sound equipment requirements. For instance, in addition to PA

speaker hire, you’re likely to need backline equipment hire to supplement the speaker setup.

For those of you unfamiliar, backline equipment refers to items such as guitar amps, and in some instances, musical instruments such as drum kits. Then you’ve got to add in auxiliary equipment such as stage monitors, subwoofers, and microphones. All of this equipment then needs to be mixed and balanced (via a mixing desk) to ensure there’s a coherent and cohesive sound coming from the stage when the band is performing.

If you’re a live band, this can all seem like a cumbersome distraction, when all you really want to do is turn up and play. For those of you booking live bands for your event, hopefully, you can now appreciate that it’s a little more complicated than simply hiring a few speakers and hoping the group in question take care of the rest.

In fact, in our ten-plus years of supplying hire packages to live bands and event organisers, we’ve found a strong correlation between the price of the group and the ability to provide equipment themselves. The more expensive the band, the less likely they are to include sound equipment and other associated production aspects as part of their service.

Even if they do, it’s usually provided by a third-party anyway, so you may as well have all of the sound equipment hire and event production services with one supplier to maximise efficiency. This is especially the case if you’re handling a multi-supplier occasion such as a wedding or a festival.

But the sound equipment is only half the story when it comes to sound. You need sound engineers capable of bringing it all together.

Sound Engineer Services Surrey, London, and Hampshire

Even you’re an experienced musician, mixing a band isn’t easy. Many live bands try and fail to mix themselves, with sometimes disastrous results. In other scenarios, live bands delegate the sound mixing and production to a friend who might not have the knowledge required to hit the standards expected of today’s performances.

There are no two ways about it. Unless you’ve recruited someone with your complete trust, you need to hire a sound engineer to strike the right balance of acoustics, instrumental volumes, and sound equipment capabilities. This is particularly the case for event organisers who have multiple live bands lined up throughout the day, all of which will probably have different sound mixing and production requirements.

Having production staff to oversee your performance increases in importance when you consider many of the additional elements you might need to hire for the occasion such as staging, lighting equipment, and even dancefloors. So let’s explore those in a little more detail.

Live Band Stage Hire Surrey, London, and Hampshire 

Whether it’s a festival or a wedding, most live band performances require a stage to elevate the band, provide a focal point, and accommodate the various pieces of sound equipment. For most small to medium-sized groups, a 6m x 4m stage will offer plenty of room to fit all of the instruments, speakers and performers.

Of course, something you need to factor into your live band stage hire costs is the setup of the stage itself. Unless you’re well-versed in stage-building, you’ll need the help of specialists to get everything constructed correctly in a safe manner. You’ll also need to consider your weight requirements. Our 6m x 4m stage is capable of withstanding weight loads of 500km per square metre, so you’re pretty much guaranteed to be fine unless you’re planning on driving a tank over it!

Next, you need to think, as organisers or performers, about the venue. Is it indoors or outdoors? Thanks to our partners over at Outdoor Stages, we can provide all manner of outdoor stage hire, complete with arc roofs to protect bands from the infamous British weather! From outdoor performances of a few hundred attendees to outdoor festivals with 5,000+ music-lovers, we have the capacity to provide a stage suitable for the occasion.

Live Band Lighting Hire Surrey, London and Hampshire

By default, the vast majority of live band performances take place in the evening, which necessitates you hire lighting to illuminate the stage and performers. But it’s not a case of any old lighting will do. By incorporating lasers, disco lights, and spotlights, you can turn a live band’s performance into much more of an immersive experience.

As you might have guessed from the name, we provide all manner of lighting hire for live bands too! Whether you want to offer the wow factor to your clients, or you’re organising a small festival taking place during night-time hours, we can provide the lighting to elevate performances to the next level. We can also assemble the associated rigging and truss requirements, should they be necessary.

Why Choose Us for Your Live Band Equipment Hire

While there are few options when it comes to hiring equipment for your live performances in Surrey, London, and the wider Hampshire area, we are rated number one for a reason. For a start, we can provide literally every conceivable aspect of equipment required for your live show. From sound system hire to providing LED dancefloors, we’ve got it all. Crucially, we also own and operate all of our inventory, including the stages as we are part of the same overarching event production company.

We also only invest in premium and reliable sound and lighting brands such as d&b audiotechnik. Our d&b series loudspeakers offer enormous flexibility as well as a perfect design and up-to-date acoustic characteristics. These loudspeakers assimilate to their environment – always offering a brilliant sonic result and are suitable for use with a multitude of applications, from wedding productions to large scale live music festivals. They’re the brand of choice for Coldplay, Eminem and Rhianna’s live performances, so you know you’re in half-decent company!

But as excellent as our equipment stock is for live bands, we know that our hire service heavily depends on the quality of our team. Thankfully, we’re blessed with some of the best in the business.

Live Sound Engineer Hire Surrey, London, and Hampshire 

As touched upon above, mixing a band isn’t easy these days, there are plenty of inputs, and they all have to be balanced with the acoustics of the performance environment.

That’s why we choose our sound engineers carefully. We only employ a handful of sound engineers who have all met our stringent standards, one of which is having at least five years’ experience within the live sound and event production industry. But our sound engineers aren’t just incredibly experienced and knowledgeable; they’re friendly and helpful too.

Whether you’re an event organiser that’s a little in the dark about the vagaries of live band production, or you’re a successful local band looking to hire a sound professional you can trust, our team have developed a stellar reputation right across the Greater London, Surrey and Hampshire region. Our sound engineers are always flexible too. Whether you need them to act as as a front of house sound technician, or as a monitor engineer, their technical abilities run the full gamut.

But it’s not just our team that is flexible; our all-in-one live band hire packages are too.

Flexible All-in-one Hire Packages for Live Bands

We understand that no two live performances are quite the same. You could need one set of equipment for an indoor venue one week, and a completely different set up for a local outdoor festival the next. In either scenario, we have the flexibility to provide whatever you need.

We also realise that not everything is an expert on the production side of live band performances. Even experienced musicians often rely on the help of others to get them sounding as emphatic as possible. Once again, our team is happy to operate in either environment. Whether we’re taking instruction from you as a group who know your sound identity like the back of your hand, or you need us to lead the production and mixing efforts for your wedding reception band, we’ve got the knowledge and experience to handle both.

Our live band hire packages can cover sound equipment only, or we can offer an extensive all-in-one package that includes sound, lighting, staging, LED screens, on-site personnel and even a starlit dancefloor! The choice is yours.

If you’re perhaps a touch inexperienced in the technicalities (for instance, if you’re organising live sound equipment hire for your wedding) we are more than happy to sit down with you and have a cup of tea to discuss your specific event. We can then use your information to construct a package based on what the live band are going to need as part of their set up.

Choose the Best in Business for Your Live Performances Across Surrey, London and Hampshire 

Here at the Sound and Light Hire Company, we’ve worked incredibly hard over the last decade to build our industry-leading reputation in the South East region. While we aren’t the cheapest, we do provide the best value for money based on what you receive from us in terms of the quality of the equipment and personnel.

For instance, we are the only company in the UK to offer top-of-the-range d&b audiotrechnik speakers, subwoofers, amps, stage monitors, a Midas M32 mixing desk, a complete set of Shure microphones, an experienced sound engineer to set up and produce your performance, and a digital recording of your band for as little as £649! We’re able to offer such competitive prices by using our vast inventory and economies of scale to deliver better equipment, for a better price.

Whether you’re a live band on the search for live sound equipment and production staff to support local tour dates across Hampshire, or you’re organising a London-based wedding or a festival, we can really do it all. Just reach out to us using the information below any day of the week to discuss your requirements.

We look forward to working with you!