…in small venues? I stood there all night and did not a lot other than alter the compression ratio on the master compression channel to stop the amp from clipping. This was done to protect the amp, but also to smooth off vocals as if it clipped too much on the amp, it would go into “protection” mode and kill all input/output, which would be bad for the vocals, as there wouldn’t be any! But my rant is about bands who think they know better than the sound engineer, I said to all the bands about amp levels being too loud for the vocal PA being used, but they chose to ignore my advice and crank their amps anyway, then complained about the vocals not being loud enough! There was nothing I could do, the faders were at +10db on each channel, although it made no difference to volume from 0db as the compressor/limiter was keeping the level in check, it was mainly for show, so if anyone complained, I could say “look, it wont go any higher”. I wasn’t going to risk damaging the amp because the bands have no self restraint. But surprise of the night was a band that weren’t originally on the bill, which features the guitarist from the same band as I mentioned in my previous entry always being too loud, he was actually quite restrained last night, they had the best vocal sound of the night as I had something to work with instead of the mess coming off stage! But it still pisses me off that these musicians don’t understand the principles of sound, 100 watts running through 16ohms is going to be insanely loud, and much louder than a 1,000 watt amp running through 6ohms. And since most of the bands had two guitarists, Phil’s poor little amp had no chance in hell, I gave as much volume as possible, just running it under the clip limiter, and for those of you that don’t know where the clipping point is, its +12db, so that’s 12 decibels above the nominal level of zero decibels. At the end of the day, I have a limited amount of power to use, and if that isn’t enough, it’s beyond my control, I done the best I could with the equipment I had. But it has made me realise one thing, just how good the Phoenix PA actually is in comparison, it’s not that good in comparison with the best, but it sounds pretty good if engineered well!
