From carl@vanselman.com Sun Dec 28 01:17:11 2003
Subject:Echo.. co.. co.. co..

Last nights gig. Arrived for this 21st birthday bash with my 8 piece party band called the Cleaving Heevages and walked into a brand new hall built of nice new shiney wood. Wooden floors, wooden walls and a nice high roof, right up into the rafters with not one but three shiney wooden peaks. It was just awful.

As per usual for this sort of gig there was no time for a sound check (one of the reasons we have a full time sound guy). So we start playing.... the sound was thrown back from every lovely shiney surface and it was crap! Samson (our sound man) was going frantic, trying to tweek the PA and then running around the hall to see how bad it still was. There was a bar at the back of the hall and all the audience cramed close to that, there seemed to be nothing we could do but carry on. During our first break we decided that the only thing to do was to bring the volume down just as far as we could. So for the second set we took the drummers sticks away and left him with brushes, turned off the mikes for the brass and turned the whole thing into a game.. how quiet can you go. It was better but still pretty awful, at least the audience got into the whole 'quiet' idea and started dancing 'quietly', turned out fun in the end.

How about everyone here, what do you do to overcome bad acoustics at a gig, besides turning off any reverbs on your amps.

Carl

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