Okay, sound. There are three important things:
1) Each musician has to be able to hear themselves;
2) Each musician has to be able to hear the other musicians;
3) The audience has to be able to hear the band.
#1 is sometimes an issue, especially when I’m singing with my earplugs in (Google “occlusion effect”). To that end, I bought some IEMs and a little headphone amp to run out the headphone jack of my keyboards: they serve as ear protection while also letting me dial in just a touch of my keys so I can hear them clearly. That pretty much solved that issue.
#2 is no problem most of the time. We’ve got a good setup for rehearsals, and usually have enough control over things when we play our little garage parties (we own and run our own PA, etc.) so that everyone is placed well, amplification is where it needs to be, etc.
#3 has been tricky. It’s hard to be the performer and also act as a soundperson at the same time. With some trial and error, feedback from the audience, and detailed notetaking, we’ve managed to do pretty well recently – I’d say our last gig was the best in that regard, with people remarking that they could hear everything.
Then we come to last night and the venue … It was really loud, with more people talking than listening to us. The stage layout was weird, so we couldn’t be in our normal positions. We had to use their sound system, which was not good. They also didn’t have a dedicated soundperson, just an employee who half paid attention and didn’t necessarily do anything promptly if, for example, a mic wasn’t loud enough. We weren’t going to bring my wife’s whole drum set for a three-song set, so she just brought her cajon, which is so much quieter. All that added up to making it really hard to hear each other. I felt like I was just playing by myself and hoping that we were together, which really exacerbated my nervousness. We definitely got out of sync a couple of times and had to work to get back together without the song completely falling apart, which was a huge distraction from playing. I had my IEMs so I could hear myself but may have just made it harder to hear everyone else. Finally, the owner didn’t want the volume too loud, which is fair, but a lot of our friends said we were too quiet, and they couldn’t hear us well enough over the crowd talking, which was really disappointing. So I guess #1 was fine, but #2 and #3 failed pretty miserably.
That’s all a long way of saying that the sound sucked, which in turn really interfered with my playing, which in turn made me more nervous, which in turn … Well, you get the idea. I don’t really know what to do about that other than simply avoid playing there again or anywhere like it. Right now I’m thinking we just stick to our own gigs, where at least we have control over our sound. In the meantime, I’m counting it as some good experience and another lessoned learned.
