Are we wimps or just getting old?

[The Dude]

Blonde, right?

Actually, by my recollection, she was a brunette, but it was probably dyed.

[Chuck H]

I'm going to bust into the mix here (loud and proud ) regarding nsubulysses and Enzo's exchange.

When I played out I was constantly butting heads with sound guys and club owners about turning down. I was using a 50W Marshall with a master volume that never got above 3 through a 4x12 cab. I'm not kidding here. Live drums with no mic's. My amp was never mic'd. PEOPLE FROM THE AUDIENCE WOULD ASK ME TO TURN UP!!! No disrespect to anyone here that's ever run sound. I actually believe you guys would know better. But MOST sound guys are awful. Most club owners are, as mentioned before, more concerned with the bartender being able to hear the orders. MOST OF THE PEOPLE AT THESE SHOWS WERE OURS!!! They wanted a rock show. These were clubs with stages, not the lobby of the municipal library for f#@ks sake. You guys know different amp models and what they do. A 50W master volume Marshall on three isn't that damn loud. I had to use stomp boxes to get my dirt. My point is just that what actually works for a real live show is one thing and what most sound guys and club owners idealize in their fantasies is different. I'm sure that every guitar player that ever passed through the places I'm talking about was asked to turn down. Like some tic or conditioned response these guys just do that. I would have thought this group would be familiar with this phenomenon. I have to side with guitar players here. I've heard stories about the wannabe guitar gods cranking up hundred watt stacks at small venues, but I've never, ever, actually seen it. More likely it's a false sour grapes story from sound guys that don't know how to do their job.

Rant over

[The Dude]

Hey,......would ya turn that rant down a notch?

[Justin Thomas]

Chuck,

+1,000,000.

Justin

[The Dude]

......MOST sound guys are awful......

That could be a thread on its own.

Sample employment application/test for club house technician.

TEST EXAMPLE 1
1) Do you own a large stereo? Y N
2) Can you turn things on and off? Y N
3) Will you work for 5 bucks an hour? Y N
etc.

Instead of:

TEST EXAMPLE 2
1) Which is higher 60Hz or 15Khz?
2) Explain what the ratio and threshold knobs on a compressor do.
3) What is mid sweep and how do you use it?
etc.

Sadly, I think most clubs use test example 1.

Now there's no (good) excuse for having a shitty house tech. BUT, having said all of that, I'll add a note for the clubs.
When a club hires you, it's for one reason and one reason only- to boost liquor sales. Most club owners don't even care if the band is good or not. I've seen great bands that don't draw for whatever reason. I've seen crappy bands with packed houses because they have lots of friends and draw well. Generally, more people = more booze sold. The bar's livelihood is selling liquor. They only care about how much the tills ring. If you don't like it, maybe you shouldn't play bars (insert grain of salt here). As a bar musician, when you play a bar, you are nothing more than a glorified liquor salesman. You don't have to like it, but accepting it will keep you much busier in the clubs.

[Tom Phillips]

...MOST sound guys are awful...

+1 Yep that's been my experience. And I'll bet that many of them were the guy sweeping the floor the previous month. However, once they get to work the board they are instantly the know it all. Ideally, the sound guy should be a full fledged member of the band but that doesn't work for the average gigging band.

[Enzo]

I wasn't intending to speech-make at Ulysses, sorry if it came out that way.

You know, a lot of sound guys are terrible, but well, so are a lot of bands and their musicians. Our guy played pretty well, but he thought he was Jimi Hendrix. Gawd, let me throw a rug over that stack.


That Marshall stack tends to be a bit of a beamer, so yeah it isn't all that loud off center. So the people on the sides can't hear it. I bet the turn it up people are not the ones right in its path. So you turn up so everyone can hear it off to the sides, then it overpowers everything else in front of the amp. And we are back to micing the amp so EVERYONE in the crowd hears the same thing. If you have a 50 watt on 3 and are not blowing out the back walls, more power to you. But for every one of you, there are ten guys who take their fore arm to the controls, set them at 11 and don't care what the band sounds like as long as they get THEIR "tone".

[DrGonz78]

What I find happens is that a guitarist will have every intention of keeping their volume at a suitable level. Now I say that in the respect of an experienced guitarist who is aware of how the whole mix should be on stage. Problem one arises half way through the show and they turn up their volume. Either it's the energy of the night, everyone else is getting louder or they are just going deaf. Probably it is all three. I have reviewed many recordings of my band over the years and that was something I was guilty of all the time. I did get better at trusting my volume levels later on as I got more experienced. There were times the sound guy would say turn down and there were times I was told to turn up. Eventually I figured it out and nobody ever bugged me again about it all.

I really wish I wore ear plugs for all those years!! My hearing is still pretty good but tinnitus has rocked my world by surprise as of late. I always had ringing in the ears that came and went, key word there is WENT. I also suffer from TMJ problems and many times I would be jamming for hours grinding down on my teeth eventually leading to lock jaw problems. I quit playing music in a live situation back in 2009 and have not really gone to many live shows or jams. My hearing and TMJ got way better after I quit playing live music.

However, since late January of this year I had severe inflammation that went up my back through my neck and into my jaw. Most people might not realize that TMJ issues can work its way up through your back, shoulders and neck. For over two months I was in a fog and felt like I had just been beat up. Around late March I made a decision to stop repairing amps for a local guitar shop and focus on my health. Every time I would start taking apart an amp it would cause the left side of my jaw to start to lock up. I felt like a wimp and too young to be feeling older so fast. At one point I went to the doctor cuz my ear and eye felt like they had been punched by a heavy weight boxer. My ear was not infected but the Dr thought I had a build up of something in auditory tube(nasal to ear) or something. Eventually my dentist showed me how to get the inflammation out of my jaw using acupressure massage therapy. That was the first week of April and immediately my pain from the TMJ stuff was getting better. Then all of a sudden one day both my ears started to ring at about 9khz. Been ringing non-stop since the second week of April this year.

Tinnitus is a horrible condition and once you have hearing damage there is no going back. I keep wondering if the ringing is ever going to go away this time? In my case the TMJ is playing a role into the tinnitus so it is a strange situation. Just writing all this because I know other's out there in this community must be suffering from very similar ailments. Stan had mentioned he suffers from it too and the mixing of music in a studio was part of my hearing damage. Also, wondering how you cope and what treatments might have helped other people here with tinnitus?

[Leo_Gnardo]

+1 Yep that's been my experience. And I'll bet that many of them were the guy sweeping the floor the previous month. However, once they get to work the board they are instantly the know it all. Ideally, the sound guy should be a full fledged member of the band but that doesn't work for the average gigging band.

There's a disturbing new trend at our local 600-capacity rock club. Got a fresh young fellow who "mixes by computer". And if you fail to adequately tip him in advance, he takes revenge by pitch shifting the whole mix. If it was up to me, I'd stuff his computer you know where and have him go back to pushing a broom, and if he don't like it, out the door. Pemanent-like. I don't see how the management allows it.

[nsubulysses]

Everyone has good points and I didn't think I was in an argument really. I didn't take it that way. Sorry I didn't mean to argue with anyone either.

Anyway, our band has a plan which is to just ask the sound guy to put vocals, kick drum and snare through the mic, and please leave us alone on all other fronts. We need to have sustain and feedback, and it needs to hit hard when we hit the low notes. Put a V4 or Sound City 120 on 2 and it sounds bogus as hell. When it's turned up to distort slightly, and then you have an overdrive in front of it, it's glorious. Low, low volume with an overdrive and you might as well play a Crate.

Actually this whole mentality started for me (bypass the sound guy) because I used to play in a drum machine band. If you let the sound guy have control you can't hear anything, especially the drum machine, and you have NO idea where you are in the song if you can't hear the drums. After a handful of terrible shows barely even getting through the songs because we can't hear the drums we got two JBL PA cabs and a power amp for the drum machine that would do 850W per side. After that we had loud bass and guitar amps, and our drum machine was controllable by us with our own PA, so we just asked the sound guy to put vocals ONLY through the PA. Most of the time they were happy because they didn't have to do anything, and we actually got to sound pretty good and we could hear our drum machine tracks. Many better shows after that -- we just needed to spend $1000

I guess my mentality is "please leave me alone" since we play many house shows and small venues with inadequate PAs and we can manage to sound good all by ourselves. IT's only when we go to a medium sized club that everything gets messed up. When you play a big club they usually don't care anyway because at that stage they have a massive PA, and are used to and are expecting loud rock bands to play.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Eventually my dentist showed me how to get the inflammation out of my jaw using acupressure massage therapy. That was the first week of April and immediately my pain from the TMJ stuff was getting better. Then all of a sudden one day both my ears started to ring at about 9khz. Been ringing non-stop since the second week of April this year.

That was some wonderful advice from your dentist. Most US doctors of all sorts still regard anything they didn't learn in med school as witch doctor gah-bage. What is disturbing is your current ring. Don't look now but one of the symptoms of clogging carotid artery is hi pitch whistling in the ears. Ask your MD and get 'em checked next time around. Don't let him put you off with the usual "only people in their 80's get that."

[Chuck H]

Western medicine is pretty much:

If you need pills for discomfort we can provide that.

If you have a broken or infected body part we can cut it out or, more rarely, repair it.

That's a gross over exaggeration of course, but that's the nutshell version. I'm a classic skeptic and I take great issue with many less scientific medical practices. However, I can't deny results. Many cultures much older than western medicine have developed practices that do actually work for much that western medicine ignores. Some of these practices have been studied and proven by modern medicine, some have been debunked and many remain ignored. This has been my personal experience anyway. Western medicine certainly isn't to be despised or avoided. But many circles of western medicine seem to disregard or despise alternative practices. Even going so far as to imply there is never any alternative to western medical practices. I'm not a doctor, but my own experiences have been that this is entirely wrong and counter productive. It's unfortunate that there are so many bogus fringe and folk medicine profiteers smearing the perception of any medical practice that hasn't been studied by science.

Sorry to go off topic. Leo got me going. It's his fault

And way to go Leo for knowing and sharing what could be such an important piece of information

[g1]

Got a fresh young fellow who "mixes by computer". And if you fail to adequately tip him in advance, he takes revenge by pitch shifting the whole mix.

Seriously? I'm not a violent person, but in that situation, I'd slide him the amount of cash I thought his laptop was worth and "decommission" it.

[John_H]

wimp
wimp/Submit
informal
noun
1.
a weak and cowardly or unadventurous person.
synonyms: coward, namby-pamby, pantywaist, milksop, weakling, milquetoast; More
verb
1.
fail to do or complete something as a result of fear or lack of confidence.
"anyone who wimped out because of the weather missed the experience of a lifetime"

Nope, not a wimp. The plans for this next week include kayaking, water skiing, and mountain biking. This fall I'm racing in the 50+ class in a couple of MRAN events, and just this week I had my Dr. do the paperwork so I can get my NHRA license.

I am getting older though, and that sucks. I recently went through some health issues, and I've worked hard for the last few months to get back in shape. It was all worth it though. So many health issues for guys our age (50's-60's are who I'm referring to, and most of us fit that demographic) are due to poor diet, and lack of exercise. In the USA more than two thirds of us are overweight, and well over half are considered obese. Heart Disease, diabetes, and COPD type afflictions are for the most part self inflicted. I refuse to be part of that group. I'm pretty active at 57. Today is a workout day. I took Sunday and Monday off. I bicycled this morning for an hour. I'll work on some gear today, and this afternoon I'll lift weights, and swim laps. My Dad has been a great example for me. He's 86, and still goes to the gym 3 or 4 times a week. He's often mistook for someone much younger. He gave me his bicycle ten years ago when he quit riding. It's the one I rode this morning.

This highly mutated thread has aimed itself at so many topics. Where do I start?

I used to have a bunch of big combo amps. The only one I kept is my BFSR that I re-did as a twin. I still buy, and sell, but they don't stick around. I split up my PA gear between my kids so if it's ever needed it's handy, and I don't have to store it.

Live sound; Been there , done that. You guy's are a rough crowd. It was always interesting when the last couple of bands go onstage drunk as fuck. You should never mess with a guitarist's tone no matter how shitty they sound. You'll never win.

Hearing loss is permanent; Between power tools, dirt bikes, dragsters, and amplifiers, my hearing is shit. I wish I would have protected it better when I was young. One interesting thing I'll share is that my tinnitus symptoms disappear for a while after a cleanse.

The generation gap; I've always thought I was pretty hip. Even if I was younger I'd probably consider 'Noise Bands' to be ridiculous. There's nothing impressive about just being loud, and playing crap music. I still love the sound of a big amp, but in the right venue.

Modern Medicine; With Insurance companies, drug manufacturers, The Surgeon General, The ACA, and The FDA controlling things, We're all kinda fucked. Do you know how many people are walking around out there addicted to psychotropic drugs, and pain killers? The system is broken. It's been designed to make the rich richer instead of putting patients first.

[Leo_Gnardo]

And way to go Leo for knowing and sharing what could be such an important piece of information

Thanks Chuck, hi blood pressure can do it too. When there's only a small aperture to let blood through, tends to whistle. Think oboe reed.