Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
Bill Walker wrote: "Of course Billy Cobham and Lenny White had a lot to do with ratcheting up the volume. " True Bill.................I was with you at those exciting and mind bending concerts (we were the ONLY ones at Winterland who were standing up with our mouths agape at the sound of a 3rd bill group, Mahavishnu, playing "Inner Mounting Flame" two weeks before they even release it on Columbia records......................what a life changing experience that was)..... ........but, honestly, I have a different take on the whole ratcheting up of the volume controversy. I don't think it was Cobham and Lenny White (despite their immense power and volume) who were responsible for ratcheting up the volume in the earliest days of fusion. Hendrix, the Who and Blue Cheer had ramped up the volume with their guitar amps in the 60's but they were using 50 and 100 watt amplifiers at the time. I remember hearing the Jefferson Airplane debut 'Surrealistic Pillow" two weeks before they released that record at Frost Ampitheater at Stanford with a large collection of Fender Twin Reverbs and a smallish P.A. system for the vocals and drums and it was deafeningly loud. Remember that the Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York with a Bogen P.A. system that amplified the vocals and NOT the guitars or the drums. Go check out the film footage from this era. The screaming teenage girls so drowned out the music that it made the Beatles give up performing live for good. Ringo Starr started a whole new school of studio drumming by playing fills at weird times when the screaming would subside a little bit, allowing him to actually even hear his own drum set. By the early 70's, however, people were using Fender Dual Showmans and Marshall stacks and the wattage went through the roof. Then equipment changed and the volume of modern popular music went through the roof in the early 70's. Any acoustic trapset drummer will tell you that when you compete with a Marshall Stack, that a guitar is VASTLY louder than an acoustic un-miced drumset. I've rehearsed with loud bands where I played a huge Vistalite Ludwig kit with double 22" inch kicks large sized toms where I was completely drowned out by the guitarist. I'd get blisters trying to compete with the volume. I remember having a huge argument with the first guitarist in Tao Chemical where I insisted that he put his guitar on the side of the stage pointed directly at his ears (where I , the drummer had to sit for years before taking the brunt of his loud trebly sound) so that he would turn his volume down. I got huge blisters on my hands from playing as hard as I could to compete and I had no nuance whatsoever in my playing. It made me stronger competing but certainly not subtler. ******* Nowaday, the average kid can spend $300 on a guitar amplifier on sale that can blow the hell out of the loudest acoustic drummers. Add to this the incredible reduction in dollar (euro/pound/yen) per watt that has occurred in modern sound reinforcement and the prevalence of huge subwoofers powered by literally thousands of Watts at large venues and it's the technology that ramped up the volume NOT the drummer. LOL, okay, that's my drummerly rant about volume for the quarter. I'll be back with more obnoxious soap boxing about volume in three months.......................LOL Rick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------