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Volume Problems: Dealing With Club OwnersBy: Stephen FosterStephen is the owner of On Course Publishing, Howler Recording, and maintains two domains besides IDN: yardageguides.com, for golf books, and golphoto.com, for golf photographs. |
| Question: We keep getting told to turn it down. The bands amps need to be at a certain level for them to even work correctly. Can you post some info or other folks' experiences with "keeping it down" so the club owner doesn't freak out? Stephen Answers: This is soooo hard to work out. If you have a loud drummer, the only way to be heard on stage is to keep up with him, and some drummers CAN'T play quietly, in fact some of the best drummers I've ever worked with were just LOUD. If this is the case, one of the first things you can do is look at minimal miking of the drums. Kick & snare work just fine in most small clubs. Make sure the amps are set up on stage to get a "back line" balance. You can angle the amps so that there is a good balance for the drummer. Once you get this stage mix, the guy out front is responsible for keeping the overall level down. Sometimes it's the engineers fault. Many engineers will get the drum sound with the levels way up, then try to turn it back down to mix the drums with the other instruments. This works well in theory, but in real life, when you turn those drums down the sound changes, so they end up getting edged back up, and everything has to come up with them, right? Bang...you're loud, and the club owner can't hear himself think. The trick is to get that kick and snare sound at moderate levels, so it sounds right at those levels. The rest of the kit is easy. Once you've got a tight, clean drum sound, bring the bass up to the kick and see if it will pressurize the room. This pressurizing of the room by the bass is critical. It gets the room working to help sustain the low end of the band, and lets the bass guitar get the drums humming. The bass needs to be at the lowest volume it will run and still sustain throughout its natural range. Then bring up the guitars to that level. If it's still too loud for the club, the bass may need to be compressed (at the amp, not in the PA), which will help some in some cases. Guitars are very loud in hi-mid frequencies, but are not so noticably loud when the low end of the amp is emphasized, and the mids and highs cut some. This leads to a chunkier sound, and the guitarists will have to be very accurate, because every mistake will show up, but you can turn the amps up without hurting anybody's ears. I've had club owners bring in a decibal meter, and the guitars were just killing it, but when we turned the mids & highs down on the AMPS, turned up the bass end a touch, and turned UP a little, the problem went away. Good guitarists can do this. Bad ones will sound horrible, so be forewarned. The whole backline setup is designed to be quiet but dynamic. Sometimes the guitarists will need a little compression to get dynamic (again, at the amp), and they eventually need to try to get amps which match the environments they play in.� Marshall (or Marsha, when the lls get knocked off) full stacks don't belong in 150 seat clubs. A smaller punchier amp can be used and turned up. In the end, a guitar amp needs to be powered up before it really starts working right, so a small amp turned up will sound better than a large amp turned down. If yopu can get this mix on stage, and you may need to angle the amps this way or that to get the stage mix where all the musicians can hear each other, THEN you can bring up the monitors for vocals & effects. In other words, don't put anything in the front or monitor mix which you don't need. Let the amps and drums level out as sonically as possible before you crank the monitors. You're going to have to figure out whether it's the fronts or the band that's causing the problem If it's the PA, just turn it down. If it's the amps it's harder, and guitarists can be nutty about volume (being one myself, I know whereof I speaketh). I've seen guitarists turn their amps sideways into a corner to get the volume down out front, I've even seen them turn them around backwards, but the small punchy amp turned up a litle is usually the best solution. Most bands play a whole lot loudeer than they rehearse. I don't know why, but that seems to be the case. And rerhearsal usually sounds great!! So why change the way you play live just because you've got a PA system? Get that tight, gutsy feeling of playing WITH each other, not for the room, and the audience will get right in there with the band. It becomes a more personal thing, and not such a BIZ-glitz thing. |