Worst gig ever!

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MWaldorf
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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby MWaldorf » Sun Apr 01, 2012 9:11 pm

Wow, that's a drag. I've had similar experiences in various venues through the years. There's a point where the drummer can't play quietly enough without drastically changing his style and it stops being fun, and starts being a job. At that point I try (*try*) to be philosophical and figure "that's entertainment".

My favorite was when the manager of the club that we'd played several times came up a song or two into the set and asked if we play any "real music". Sigh.
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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby Veenture » Mon Apr 02, 2012 1:43 am

I love reading these anecdotes. Danny, you're not alone. On one of Jimi Hendrix's records you can hear him ask the audience:
"Is it too loud... is it too loud, up there?" Answering his own question -in a kind of hoarse-, whispering mode: "that's your problem".

Rock on.

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby JimPage » Mon Apr 02, 2012 7:10 am

Veenture wrote:
>>"that's your problem" . . .

Paul, that is a really great quote and sums up the whole situation.

MWaldorf wrote:
>>There's a point where the drummer can't play quietly enough without drastically changing his style . . .

Mel, that's absolutely true!

Outeredge wrote:
>>some of the people actually asked us to turn UP!

The last time our country band played a local Moose Lodge, which was a big hall (held about 350 people) with a real stage, we were repeatedly told to turn down. After the gig, several in the audience told us we were not loud enough! "Why did you keep turning down your sound levels? We couldn't hear you anymore!" I actually got the fellow in charge of the event and drug him over to hear those comments. I suspect that the it's-too-loud crowd are just more vocal in their objections compared to the average audience member.

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby MWaldorf » Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:01 am

An interesting aside to this - the management is theoretically responding to keep customers happy. But, especially at bars, who's going to be spending more money - the people who want lively music to dance to, or the fuddy-duddy people complaining about the noise? I'd say comp the complainers a free drink for their next visit when it will be quiet and shuffle them on their way. :)
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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby dubtrub » Mon Apr 02, 2012 12:08 pm

Well, this was a hard lesson learned for our band, never book a gig for a non drinking audience. We were told that in advance but we didn't realize how restricting that would be. I'd rather play for rowdy drunks any day than 400 sober geriatrics. At car shows we always prefer to set the band up near the beer booth. :lol:
Danny Ellison

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby JimPage » Mon Apr 02, 2012 12:18 pm

Dubtrub wrote:
>>never book a gig for a non drinking audience . . .

That may be the answer! Words to live by . . .

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby MOSDAN » Tue Apr 03, 2012 3:55 pm

Hey Danny-Sorry to hear of your experience. I think we have all been there before. I guess I fit into that characterization of old geizer but, hey, I still play and like music to be heard. I'm not with a hearing aid but I think many older people are and the hearing aids actually amplify the sound right into their ear canals so to them it's very loud. I have actually told some of the old people complaining at gigs to turn their hearing aids down or turn them off if the music is too loud for them. At one gig several years ago we did for the the Good Sam Club in Fort Worth, I played with several other musicians at a gig that had been planned for a long time. With few exceptions, all of the audience was older and complaining about the volume. Finally, we got tired of the complaints and went out into the audience and got chairs and brought them on stage. We then turned off the PA and guitar amps. We put the electric guitars away and got out acoustic guitars and sat down and started playing-totally acoustic, no mics or other electrics. The drummer with us also got 2 chairs-one he sat on and the other turned upside down and kept time on the bottom cross member between the legs of the chair. When people complained they couldn't hear us we just said "What, we can't hear you" back to them. All in all we had a good time.

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby JimPage » Tue Apr 03, 2012 5:00 pm

MOSDAN wrote a funny story about geezers and their hearing aids:
>>the hearing aids actually amplify the sound right into their ear canals so to them it's very loud . . .

That may be part of the problem, especially of they are wearing old-tech hearing aids.

I wear them in both ears, even while playing, but mine are high-tech and don't cause any problems with live music.

The University of Maryland has a gee-whiz hearing and speech clinic and they even encouraged me to bring in a guitar, since I play music so much, when they were fitting and programming my hearing aids.

The only problem was the first month of wearing the things; for some reason it made me as dizzy as a coot when I first wore them. Also, when playing guitar that first month, I was aware of the teeny lag between the actual sound and the reception of the sound in my ears. The doctor said that the delay was on the order of nine nanoseconds, but when playing guitar that first month I was aware of the lag and it threw me off a bit.

The ones I have just boost the exact frequencies I need boosted and aren't like those old-timey pink-colored ones folks used to wear. They fit behind the ear and a teeny clear tube carries the sound into the ear.

I love them and highly recommend them.

--Jim
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• '67 Mosrite Celebrity II
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• Basses: Ashbory, Hofner, 51RI Precision, 5-string, fretless

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby Nokie » Thu Apr 05, 2012 4:02 am

I've played a couple of rooms where the managers of the places used a dB meter on the bands to tell them they were too loud. One was a popular club in Hermosa where many surf bands played up to a couple of years ago. Another was a Tuesday Afternoon club. -Marty

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Re: Worst gig ever!

Postby jfine » Mon Apr 30, 2012 3:32 am

Dubtrub--I feel your pain. I think any of us that have been playing for a while have been through something similar. Some years ago, I played a gig at the Moose lodge in Vallejo, CA with a country band. It was a fair-sized room with a low ceiling, and we started out at what we felt was a very moderate volume level, but the complaints started right away. Remember, we were a country band, so we certainly weren't playing at anything resembling rock 'n' roll volume. It turned out that this was an awards banquet for all the old Mooses (Meese?), and most of the crowd had to be over 80. People insisted on sitting right in front of the PA speakers, and then wanted to converse in normal tones. We kept getting quieter, and quieter...and quieter...until we reached the point where, if we'd had acoustic guitars we'd have been too loud--I was hearing my pick on the strings of my solidbody acoustically, louder than what was coming out of my amp. The bass player was muttering under his breath, and I whispered to him, "Keep it down--we might need to play here again sometime!" The drummer took it as a personal challenge to see how lightly he could play and still have his brushes (sticks were too loud) actually contact the drum heads, and laughing the whole time.
Then there was the time I got hired to accompany a female vocalist doing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a Memorial Day celebration at the Vallejo waterfront three or four years ago. She was an operatic wannabe, had no idea of what key she did it in, so we had a little rehearsal a couple of days before at my house, and she asked me what I needed to have for the gig. We had already discussed payment, so I asked her if there was going to be a PA for her, and she said there would be, so I told her that I just needed an outlet to plug my amp into, so I'd plug into whatever the PA was plugged into. I got to the gig an hour early to set up, and found out that the "PA" was a battery-powered podium with a mic attached, and put out maybe ten watts max. No problem, I thought--there was an outlet behind the Veterans' Monument 25 feet away, and I even had enough extension cord to reach it. Set up, turned the amp on--nothing--the outlet was deader than a doornail. "Oh, yeah," said one of the veterans who was in charge of putting this thing on--"You have to go to the city office to get the outlet turned on." "There won't be anyone there," I replied. "It's MEMORIAL DAY!!" So, I took a look at the podium, which, like I said, was battery-powered, and saw that, lo and behold, it had a second input. I plugged into that input, and found out that input #2 cancelled out input #1, which was the mic input. I went to the vocalist and presented her with this: " You can either sing without the mic and have accompaniment," which she was more than strong enough to do--we were playing for only about 25-30 people--"or you can use the mic and sing acapella." "Oh, I couldn't possibly sing without the mic," she said. I told her that, in that case, I expected to be paid anyway, as I was there ready to play and it wasn't my fault that they didn't have electricity. It was the only time in my life that I've been paid to hold an inaudible guitar and not play a note!
Then there was the time I did a wedding gig with a jazz big band, outdoors in (I kid you not) 113-degree heat, with no shade for the band, wearing a black tuxedo. I thought I was going to pass out several times, and I knew that if I did I'd probably die--and luckily, I didn't! I was playing a Tele-style guitar with a tortoiseshell pickguard that warped from the heat. Definitely one of those "Tell again why I do this?" gigs.


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