The Living Rockumentary

Having worked the sound board for so many shows has influenced the way I now enjoy concerts. That might not be a good thing. Ignorance may, in fact, be bliss.

When I started taking recording classes in the early 90's, my professors kept repeating one warning to all us music-loving students. You will never hear music the same way once you start studying how it is recorded. I wasn't particularly scared of that since I had laready been making my own 4-track recordings and had pretty much always listened to music in a deconstructive way. I can remember boring the tears out of one old girlfriend while playing little pieces of XTC's Oranges and Lemons (it had just come out). "What is that swooshing sound!! Why did they put that there?!?" Or about Scarecrow People, "Listen to this crescendo, it's incredible, you think it's over and then it just keeps going, listen to all of that stuff going on! and then look, wait, wait listen! The one singular cowbell thingy. Let me rewind it! Listen to this, it's amazing, how cool is that?!"

That's just how I have always listened to things, so it wasn't such a big change.

But, live music is another thing all together. When I was in highschool, the only shows I ever saw were huge stadium concerts, and I remember thinking they sounded great but I had no idea about anything that went into it. Now, after having some insight into what is possible and what isn't, and knowing what options sound-people have or bands have, I find it really hard to not be distracted by what I find to be a problem in the sound system. That's not a good thing.

I was at a show the other night that was driving me crazy. I had already heard the band before a number of times so I kind of had a feel for them. They have an acoustic guitar, standup acoustic bass, and drums. The guitar and bass both plug right into the PA system and come through the speakers, or you would never hear them over the drums, but the band has a nice naturalish acoustic sound to it generally. At this show, however, they were mixed so so so loud that it was all just a wash of intense noise.

Now, when you are doing sound in a club, lots of times the bands are loud because the guitar amps are turned way up on the stage or the drummer plays so loud that to make the rest of the band mix in with the drums you have to boost all the volumes. But, this band is different. They were loud tonight only because the soud person had turned them way up. Then, to make things worse, there was all this reverb on the drums. They sounded like they were part of a heavy metal ballad from '88. But, this band isn't supposed to be heavy metal.

Anyway, the point is that it was driving me crazy, but as I looked around, nobody really seemed to notice or care. They were all into the show. And it was a really good show, for the periods where I could ignore my own inner struggles. It's like when you are at the movies and you can see that little burst of light in the center of the screen (I think it might be a reflection of the projector bulb) and it's distracting but then you forget about and then you notice it later again and back and forth. Or is that just me?

It's really hard to get a great sound at a club. It's almost impossible, so you have to make compromises all over the place, and everybody hears things differently. I've heard people go up to the band and tell them that they couldn't hear the vocals all night, while I was sitting right there knowing that I could hear the vocals fine all night. So, I'm not complaining about the sound so much. I'm complaining that I can't get passed it during the show. I've been tainted.

I was at the Brasscat to see Spanish for Hitchhiking a while back and I couldn't enjoy any aspect of the show because the sound was like a referee whistle in my ear the whole time. The hard part is knowing that it doesn't have to be like that. The hard part is knowing that if the sound person just turned down those two knobs right there, the screaching would go away and everybody would be happier (whether they knew why or not). I don't think this problem is going to pass and all I can do is try not to bring other people down by pointing out the problems that I hear. It's going to be really tough, though.