After I was in a band for bit and started playing out, it didn’t take long to realize that some shows went much better or worse than others. In my first band, we found out quickly that there were lots of reasons why a particular show might not go so well. Sometimes we weren’t playing tight, sometimes we weren’t singing on key because we couldn’t hear ourselves too well, maybe we picked the wrong songs to play, and the list went on…way on. The good part was that we had a lot of control over most of these things. So the story went on and we fixed a lot of the initial things most bands of first-timers go through. We started making a little money and the first thing we did was throw it back into getting better gear. As the lead guitar player, I obviously first bought a ridiculously massive amp, then more effects pedals, another guitar, and finally a wireless guitar system. When asked why, at the time I might have told you “because I want to have freedom on stage” or “I have big feet and I get tangled in my guitar cable.” Then you’d call BS and think that I just wanted to be like my stadium rocking idols on our 15 foot wide stage at the bar.
At some point along the way, one thing that started getting to us was the abundance of not-so-talented live sound guys at the venues. Who knows what the actual split was, but it seemed like about half the guys found some way to blow it. One thing’s for sure: with a bad mix, it’s unlikely that it’s going to be a killer show. Before the show, if the guy said he was a kick-ass drummer, you could almost guarantee that the drums would be thumpin’ and the rest of the instruments would sound annoyingly weak. But other times it would just be too loud overall or the vocals wouldn’t be loud enough etc etc. So you might think that this would be an easy problem to solve because all we should have to do is go tell the sound guy to fix the mix. But at most venues the way it usually went was we arrived and set up our gear on stage, the sound guy set up all the mics, then he told us to play one at a time for the sound check, and then we’d start the show. Then one of three things usually happened: 1) we played the show completely oblivious and assumed we sounded awesome, 2) if the show was video recorded, we’d check it out afterward and get mad at the sound guy because we couldn’t hear the guitar solo or whatever, or 3) someone in the audience told us during the show that the bass was too loud or the vocals were too quiet, and we had no idea whether or not to trust them.
Now here’s the part where you can stop thinking that I was a tool with a fancy wireless guitar on a tiny stage. I realized after a few months…err right away that wireless let me finally go out in the audience and listen for myself how the mix was. Early in the show while everything was still ramping up, I would sneak out into the middle of the audience while playing some easy part of a song, listen for a bit, and then go way in the back to the sound guy and make him fix any big issues. Suddenly the problem was solved and just like that, our sets hit a ton more consistently.
Worth the few hundred dollars to go wireless and risk looking like a wanna-be stadium rocker? Darn right.
Adam
co-founder of merge.fm
A large round of design and user interface improvements was just launched…better dashboards, sign in + sign up pages, and landing page to name a few.
More to come!
It’s been a while since the last post about recording, so here’s a quick story on an experience I had with mic placement. (You can stop reading now if for you: audio recording < rebecca black live…and yes that is a less than sign which should break some universal rule in this case).
So I had this $100 no-name acoustic guitar that actually sounded all right with a good set of strings on it. But every time I went to record something with it, it sounded like garbage. You read about how this mic and that mic are good for recording acoustic guitars and here’s where you should place them, then you should do this, blah blah blah. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the darn thing to sound nearly as good as how it sounded to me when I just sat there and played it. Then, like most ideas I get, I was doing something else and it just randomly popped into my head to try moving the mic around a lot more than you’re supposed to and see if it sounds better. So this time I had someone else play it and then I put on some ear-cup headphones with the microphone signal coming in live. Then I moved the mic near the ground, up high, way far back, under the chair, then finally next to the guy’s ear pointing down at the guitar and POW! Magic sounding all of a sudden! But when I sat back and thought for a sec, it made perfect sense because when I took off the headphones and just listened from different places, it never sounded as good as when I was the one playing it. So for whatever reason, that guitar’s sweet spot was above it right at your head (a clever trick to make me buy a cheap guitar that I thought sounded good).
Once the idea sank in that many instruments, amps, and even voices tend to have a sweet spot where they sound that much better than anywhere else, suddenly all my recordings got that much better…even with cheap recording gear. It’s actually pretty amazing the difference it can make.
—Adam Steele
Just a quick update…
We launched a feature today to let artists track their sales. Musicians: just sign in and go to your artist page to see your sales next to each song.
You also might notice that we tweaked a few other things around the site.
Enjoy!
We’re still at it and we’ve made some improvements to merge.fm based on all the feedback from artists. Here’s some of what’s new lately.
Download
We received a lot of requests from both artists and fans to add downloadable music content. So we built a feature for artists to add a mixdown mp3 that fans can download if they buy access to the song. Artists can just go to the Edit Song Properties tab to upload/change/remove it at any time.
Design Updates
In our rush to get everything launched and in your hands as soon as possible over the last few months, we haven’t spent all that much time on design. But we finally caved and gave the main page a facelift, added search, added social buttons, and tweaked a few other things site wide. If you notice anything that doesn’t do it for you, let us know and we’ll fix it up.
New feature just launched: artists can now set their own price for each of their songs. Thanks for the suggestion Isaac!
More improvements on the way!
A little less like a cop car, and a little more like a mergefm car! Huge thanks to Dean’s Graphics for helping us out with this, and Jeff for volunteering his car!
and hello per-song access.
Over the last two weeks or so we’ve been working hard at switching merge.fm away from our monthly subscription pricing to a much better per-song pricing, and I’m pleased (as punch) to say that the new system is live. Go check it out! Even better, may I suggest buying something from local Champaign artist withershins?
Why the change? Well to be honest, you guys. You told us the monthly thing was too much of a commitment and we listened. I’m really excited about the new direction, too. You can still get the amazing experience of seeing and interacting with your favorite artists as their unreleased songs are being written, that hasn’t changed. But now for the first time ever you can go back in time and see how your favorite album songs were made.
So give it a try, and tell me what you think. I know you’ll love it :)
— will leinweber
by Adam Steele
I know I’ve been telling a lot of stories from my old band lately, but here’s another one that just popped into my head. So out of the dozens of frat shows we played, the very first one was somehow the best because the crowd got into the show more than any other crowd we ever had…even more than the crowd from the last post when we broke the stage. There was crowd surfing, people storming the stage, random duets with people in the crowd…and it was the only show we ever played where the crowd chanted the band name (in a good way). I was thinking about that show the other day when I was looking through some old pictures and why of all the shows we played, that first show was like that. It wasn’t the tightest set we ever played, and we hadn’t even figured out how to tweak cover songs to our style (the up tempo rock version of red red wine always went over really well). Then I came across a picture from that night and I saw a guy that I remembered.
Then I remembered how he was the guy who at first we wanted to punch in the face because he was drunk and kept grabbing one of the microphones and yelling into it. But then he started yelling the band name again and again…and everyone started chanting. Then he grabbed the mic and started singing along, and others started to do the same and went wild. Then he led a bunch of people on stage who started dancing. Then he jumped into the crowd without warning and they were forced to catch him, which kicked off the crowd surfing.
As I think about this now, I realize that he is the main reason for the show becoming what it was. So if you’re out there guy, thanks a ton! And if others reading this are in a band now, then you might try finding a guy of your own, bring him to your shows, and buy him a beer.
