“Just Good Enough”

A friend who is desperate to get back to making live music has, almost unwillingly, become interested in dealing with the sound of the live shows he’s trying to promote. He is a drummer and not in any way technically inclined. [I know. That does sound like the perfect candidate for a front of house technician.] A few nights ago, we had an hour telephone conversation about his last gig, which I attended for a few moments, and his questions about what went wrong with the sound.

The short answer was “everything.”

First, there was no sound check because, as usual, the musicians spent so much time fiddling with the usual unimportant crap. There was no time to do anything more than jabber “test, test, one, two, three” into each of the four microphones to ensure they made noise before the small audience got bored (which they did anyway) and started yelling at each other (aka “bar talk”). Two, one of the three players, the keyboard player, has a very high opinion of himself and is absolutely certain the audience would rather hear him pound on his keyboard than hear the vocalist or any other sound in the room. Three, there were as many as five guys who felt the need to mindlessly tweak the EQ on the mic channels, boosting the bass and low-mids 6-12dB to add “power” to their weak performances and mediocre tone. [Yeah, I’m being a bitch. Bring it on.] The end result was a booming mess filling the room with volume and no music and an audience that paid as much attention to the musicians and music as they did the ceiling fans.

In the process of describing what should have happened, my friend and I ended up recounting the few decent musical performances we’ve experienced in our cumulative 80 years as musicians and audience members and (in my case) production experiences. As a member of the audience, I can count them on the fingers of my two hands and, it’s possible, I might have some change left over. As a musician, I am probably being egotistical in saying I might have participated in twice that many decent sounding shows (out of several hundred shows that went off of the rails). As a technician, I’m back to the 10-fingers-with-change. The problem with live music is that almost everyone settles for “good enough” because doing it right takes “too much effort.” It does take a lot of effort and, based on popular music history and trends, it might not be worth it. If only a miniscule portion of the audience cares, why bother?

Of course, that argument pretty much drives everything to be mediocre. If that is your goal, you have set a highly achievable target for yourself.

50 years ago and beyond, the only people who had an amplification system for anything other than electric guitar or bass were professionals working major venues. You did not often see or hear PA systems in night clubs, bars, restaurants, or small concert venues. You didn’t need to, either. There were two reasons for that: 1) musicians were less arrogant, they didn’t need the ego reinforcement that demanding attention by being the loudest noise in the room and 2) audiences hadn’t been exposed this this kind of abuse so they were less hearing-impaired. And, more importantly, everyone from the musicians to the audience to the bar tenders and service staff were more polite.

More than 40 years ago, my studio partner and I were asked to record a local Lincoln, Nebraska “world/jazz/folk” band, The Spencer Ward Quintet, at a local nightclub. It was going to be the band’s last performance before the band members not only left the group but they left the area in five very different directions. That put some unusual pressure on getting it right the first time. The club had an oversized pa system and my partner had designed a very high fidelity sound system that he had been developing over the past several years, but I wanted as little interference from the sound system as possible which meant minimal sound pressure and maximum directionality from that system. I decided to go with my JBL 4311 studio monitors as the FOH system and nothing but the room acoustics and stage volume from the mostly acoustic instruments for ‘”monitoring.” The band was mostly willing to try my approach and other than the bass player the instruments on stage were all acoustic: guitar, vibes, percussion, violin, and electric bass. Naturally, keeping the bass volume under control proved to be the most difficult problem through out the evening.

The audience and club more than cooperated, too. Throughout the concert, the audience (which was mostly area musicians) were almost dead quiet. During the first break, as the band members were shedding their instruments and leaving the stage, I was almost injured by a jet engine sound in my phones. I pulled the phones off and looked around, assuming something somewhere in my signal path had self-destructed, but the noise was in the room and lots of people were laughing. Turned out, the bar tenders had decided not to make any blended mixed drinks while the band was on stage and had collected every blender they could get their hands on, prepared the drinks in the blenders, and the moment the music and applause stopped hit the power switches on at least a dozen blenders. They kept refilling and emptying the blenders until the band walked back on to the stage. Then, the club went silent for the next set. Considering the limits of our technology and the fact that the only remaining copy I had of the recording was a cassette (dubbed to CD more than a decade later), I am not ashamed of this recording.

After the concert was concluded, Dan and I must have had a dozen local musicians ask how we got “that amazing sound” from the house sound system? The house system had been stacked along a wall on the stage behind the band. I used it as a rough bass trap, but it was never powered up during the concert. Everyone who asked about the system walked right past the 4311s sitting on box newel posts at each front corner of the stage. Looking back, I was lucky no one knocked them off of the posts since they were clearly invisible.

What that proved to me was that volume is more of a problem than helpful and audiences will respond to what you expect from them. I have preached that lesson dozens of times over the last 40 years and, occasionally, someone listens and the result is always better than their previous practice.