It’s too fucking loud.
There are very few venues that don’t run their sound systems too hot, and the ones that don’t usually have a small PA that is either insufficient to crank out even just the vocals alone. Either that or it’s sublime. I won’t be naming any names.
I’ve been playing in bars of all sizes and mid-size event venues my entire adult life, and I love good sound. I actually won’t watch TV, listen to music, or work on my laptop without some kind of upgraded speakers to enhance the audio quality of whatever media I’m experiencing, because I actually have some control over how to make it so. I also really got into acoustic design and fabrication during the pandemic, which is super interesting. Check out the design of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Whatever your political ideas about Disney, that place is built for sound, and it looks and sounds magnificent. But I digress.
The point is that I love sound, and I dislike when it’s done improperly, which is really often. There’s enough blame to go around, and I definitely don’t want to focus on the negative, so here are my ideas on the architecture of good sound for practice rooms, bars, and anywhere else you wanna jam louder than acoustic instruments and voices.
Firstly, when you’re at practice, if you’re in a “standard band” with a guitar or two, bass, drums, and vocals, your guitars and bass shouldn’t be louder than the drummer’s kick drum, and you’ll have to make some adjustments and should be playing off and meshing with one another’s dynamics, if there are any dynamics besides blastbeats and goregrind, which is also very cool. If you’re going to throw in more instruments, consider the impact on everybody drowning out the kick drum and how to avoid that.
Your singer’s PA shouldn’t have to compete over all of that either. If the PA is feeding back trying to get over the other instruments (cuz voice is an instrument, too *crying*), you either need a more powerful PA that can handle the volume you need to cut through your loud ass band, or the band needs to chill out, which is highly unlikely.
Regarding frequency use, I’ve definitely learned to appreciate over the years the value of guitars inhabiting the upper range of frequencies, with plenty of mids, bass handling the lower range, and drums inhabiting the overall spectrum they do when tuned well (individual results may vary). I feel this has to be adjusted for depending on the room you’re playing, and usually not by much. Long rooms sound different from wide rooms sound different from short rooms sound different from narrow rooms and all the combinations thereof. Just open your ears and consider it for a minute or two. Even the construction of the floor on which your jamming affects the frequency response of the amplifier and the room in which it’s contained. Pier and beam feels different from a concrete slab, then add a lumber built stage on that, or one built from steel framing, and on and on and on. I mean, there are a lot of variables.
So, now you’re about to play a show somewhere, anywhere that has the good ol’ standard setup of three monitors along the front of the stage and one for the drummer. Definitely don’t forget the sound levels that you’ve gotten into order at practices. That’s your solid foundation on which your band’s sound is built. Now, how much of your music do you actually know? I’m asking cuz if you actually know it, you probably don’t need much in your monitor. Do you wear earplugs? No? Well, you’re going to go deaf soon, but before that I’ll tell you that you can actually hear things a little bit better in most San Antonio clubs with them in.
Rather than tell you about the most annoying monitor mixes I’ve ever heard or been asked for, I’ll tell you that there’s been more than once where my band Wulfholt (2 guitars, bass, drums, 2 vocals) has gone on stage and gotten a taste of a previous band’s monitor mix just to be completely and hilariously disgusted by it. Typical monitor mix for Wulfholt entails a tiny bit of my vocal and the drummer’s in my monitor, a touch of my guitar and our vocals in the drum monitor, and that’s it. Why? Because otherwise it’s just a huge jumbled wash of competing frequencies, especially because in a lot of clubs there’s at least one wall made of concrete or cinder block, and there are a ton of “early reflections” off of hard surfaces all around the stage, slapping all of us rockers right in the fucking ears, so why not eliminate as much nonsense as possible for great sound?
Also, you should just know how to play your songs and not have to worry about all that crap. That’s it. Be an artist, not a brat.
Now, for the sound engineers. I’ve met kind ones, wild ones, quiet ones, and nerdy ones. The best are usually the nerdy ones, but that’s cuz they’re passionate about what they’re doing and therefore give real fucks about it. My old band Man-Eaters of Tsavo once had a sound guy come up to the drums with a knife to cut out a port from the resonant head of the kick drum. Our drummer at the time had to actually yell at him to avoid it. You can get a great sound out of a kick with a virgin resonant head. It’s not gonna sound like Vinnie Paul, but it’ll probably have a juicy low end and some good sustain.
So, this is the only part where I’m not going to be able to avoid saying negative stuff, unfortunately. Most sound engineers just run everything too hot and loud. It just doesn’t need to be that loud, especially in rooms that aren’t well acoustically treated. I feel it actually dissuades a lot of people from coming to shows anymore, and it makes so many bands sound like absolute crap (especially if they’re asking for everything on 11 in each of their monitors). Again, I’m not naming any names, and I know that everybody wants to “feel it, man,” but it’s actually kind of ridiculous, especially since so few people (including sound engineers) don’t wear ear plugs, and most systems are either overpowered or underpowered, with few exceptions.
I don’t do covers. I’ve tried a few times in my life, but that shit just doesn’t stick to me, mostly because I didn’t write it, and I spend so much of my time writing my own music, which I prefer greatly. However, I have to admit, cover bands usually know what’s up when it comes to sound. They have to provide their own PA most of the time, and they invest in it because it makes them money right back. They also spend time cultivating and curating their sound through that PA over and over, through practices and repeated engagements in different settings, so they really get to learn the dynamics of their own system, and it all becomes comfy like a nice, old, soft t-shirt. Much respect.
So why aren’t a lot of house sound guys that way? I think a lot of it comes down to having to mix so many different bands through the same system, which can mean all sorts of variables and bizarre frequency casseroles each night, and the fact that they usually don’t get paid well enough to spend extra time tuning and troubleshooting their systems, unless they’re really lucky.
There are also just a bunch of sound guys who want it to be loud as fuck, and i get it. Like I said before, I understand that everybody wants to “feel it, man,” but I also think that modernity calls for moderation, which is a whole other essay honestly. One of my favorite places to play is wide and long, a nice big room, all cinderblock walls, four big subs, four big mains, and it’s always super loud there. In its defense, to properly acoustically treat that whole room would be really expensive unless you spent a lot of time building it out yourself.
Another thing to consider is how many bodies you’ve got in front of the PA. Those bodies are acoustic deflectors and dampening, and they help to control the sound before it bounces off the back and side walls. Whether it’s a fully packed house or just the bands and their SOs will also determine the volume at which the show should be run. The main mix shouldn’t always go to the same line on the board, usually 0 or unity or whatever the sound engineer wants to call it, nor should the main EQ necessarily always be the same since the variables are always changing, but your adjustments can be very small if you’ve tuned the system to something you know well that has the full range of frequency responses in it. When it comes to individual channels, I think it’s best to start with everything flat at 12 o’clock, then make adjustments based on what you can remove first, and boost if you must.
Anyways, that’s just like, my opinion man. I ran live sound at an old club called the Sanctuary 20 years ago, and I’ve been recording myself on an inconsistent basis ever since as well, starting with digital four track recorders and with a couple different audio interfaces and DAWs as the years have gone by, and I’m no expert, but I do like good sound. Do what you wanna do however you wanna do it. People will probably always talk shit because they’ve been conditioned to do it, so it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks as long as you’re happy with your sound.
