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Looper's Delight
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Chris Sewell asked: "This was also slightly ahead of my time, but maybe some of the older guys can explain what a show sounded like when all those Marshall stacks weren't just props like they are today. These days, everything goes through the PA. What did it sound like when only drums and vox went through the PA? Well, as in lots of current instances, the sound varied a lot. I heard Cream play the San Jose Civic Auditorium and Jack Bruce's rig was so loud that it drowned out both Clapton and Baker.........................the mix sucked. I heard stack of Marhsall shows that sounded really good but honestly, it was mostly for show. I heard that Eddie Van Halen had a Vox AC 30 back stage with a mic on it and a whole slew of dummy cabinets lining the stage. Roadies told me he only used the AC30 but I don't know if that's true or not. One of the salient changes in modern 'big bin' sound mixing is the advent of really high wattage available for subsonic speakers. I dont just think I"m being an old fart by saying that this trend has really greatly hurt live sound at big concerts. It's gotten so that every single mixer at bin shows feels like the bass drum has to be as gigantic as possible and take up as much frequency range as possible in the bass and subbass frequencies. The last Cure concert I attended (and like them or lump them, they are a very good sounding arena rock band) Simon Gallup's bass was so 'subbed out' that you couldn't hear the pitch in many of his lines. Here's a guy who plays with a pick and uses a very trebly , cabley sound high on the bass , frequently, playing interlocking guitaristic lines that compliment Robert Smiths guitar arrangements. His sound is intregal to the band. All you could hear was the a rumble. At the last Bjork concert, my wife and I , sitting about 12 rows up and to the right of the stage, left two thirds through the show because we were both nauseated from the subsonics which just completely overwhelmed the mix. It seems like big box mixers don't even travel around the venue and listen to the mix from different vantage points. Bruce Springsteen (again, I don't own a single album but he is so charastmatic and such a good rock performer that I've seen him 6 times) used to do four hour sound checks. He would have the band play and personally walk around the event center to all of the areas listening to the mix and giving feedback to the live mixer. His shows sounded like GOD!!!!!! The thing that bothers me is that people seem so much more interested in power than they do in actually making the mix sound good. I've seen dozens of big bin concerts (I"m a concert junky) in all styles of music that have sounded fantastic. I rarely hear anything in that setting that sounds good anymore. The biggest culprit is the subsonic multiplication in my opinion. I just hate it and have seen so many people use that over subbed sound in countless recent concerts. I actually love bass. I love subsonic bass, but there is such a thing as timbral masking........there is such a thing as having one element so loud that the other's are diminished by it. I was so excited to finally see My Bloody Valentine in London. The Bass guitar and the lead guitar were so loud that you could NOT HEAR THE VOCALS. They played one of their beautiful songs from years ago and it was three minutes before I realized what the song was. In this case, the culprit was the mad genius Kevin Shields. He purposefully wanted it as loud as it could possibly be. The critic for the London Times said something to the effect that, he couldn't hear the vocals, the songs or much of the drums but that it was a brilliant concert just for the noise that Kevin Shields made. I'm sorry but that's bullocks!!!!! Okay, rant over (he says stepping off of his soapbox pa that DOESN'T have a subsonic in it) Rick