Stadium rockin’

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