Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: April 24 2005, 19:22 |
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| Quote (TOBY @ April 24 2005, 19:46) | | Dance music is always very bass orientated which to my ears isn't nearly as painful as normal rock bands which are always more 'trebly'. It's those high end frequencies you get off electric guitars which always go for my ears |
Yes, definitely. The bass is the stuff which hits you in the gut, but it's the upper mids and some of the highs which really get you in the ears. There's often a very fine line to be drawn though, as some of those frequencies (between around about 2 and 4kHz) are the ones which make the vocals intelligible. That's a good reason not to crowd that range with guitars and cymbals, actually...
Making the mix mid-heavy can make it very hard on the ears, not least because our hearing is most sensitive there.
| Quote | | I hate small crappie PA's turned up full volume, they're the worst for your ears. |
There we come into another phenomenon - distortion.
Actually, I mentioned part of the problem with small venues before - drums. Put an acoustic drumkit into a small room with a strong and enthusiastic drummer behind it and it can be incredibly loud all on its own. Add in a band trying to be heard over it and you have a recipe for the familiar ear-bleed scenario. With the drums, you've already got the hi hat and snare kicking out a good amount of midrange energy (in precisely the range where our hearing is most sensitive), then the cymbals bring more mids and highs to the party. Then what happens? Along comes the guitarist with his Marshall stack, on which he's already turned up the highs so he can sound like his idol Steve Noodlesteen (or whatever his name is), and of course, bucketloads of distortion, which then introduces a load more high frequencies in. Things go wrong from there on in, because of course, the singer will then go and stand in front of the drummer, leaving the vocal mic pointing at the drums, which are really the last thing that need to be amplified. The guitarist might also sing too, and he'll have his Marshall stack right behind him so he can hear it, and where it points straight into his microphone. Because of all that, nobody can hear the vocals, so they turn the PA up louder, which of course ends up amplifying the drums and guitar yet more too. That then pushes the underpowered amp and rather suspicious speakers too far, and they start to distort - perhaps only mildly, but enough to make the sound even more harsh than before. Couple that with a reflective room where the sound just bounces around, and you have a recipe for serious pain (and also for wildly howling feedback).
The trouble is that a really good PA can cost way more than most gigging bands can (or want to) afford - you could spend many thousands of pounds (or indeed Euros) on getting a good, clear sounding rig just for gigs of that size, and that's before considering things like microphones, which can of course also have a bearing on the clarity of the sound. Things like the dispersion pattern of the speakers is important as well, otherwise you can end up throwing lots of the sound out into the wrong place which, if you're indoors, will bounce back a little while later, not helping the clarity at all, but raising the overall sound level and making it hurt more (that's part of the reason for having speakers in clusters - each speaker will generally be designed to project out a fairly narrow beam, so they can then be arranged in an array which projects sound out to where it's wanted, instead of just throwing it out all over the place).
It's the same with home sound systems - good, clean power costs money, but it's a lot less painful to have a quality hifi system kicking out a loud but even signal than it is to have a cheap radio blasting out over a narrow band of frequencies (and usually by the time you've got the wanted frequencies to the level you want them, there are unwanted ones higher up or lower down which are louder)...luckily most cheap radios don't go that loud.
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