Well, we sounded better than anyone on the circuit AND had the Marshalls on stage... so I guess we got the visual AND the sound. Hehehemarkwayne wrote:I felt the same way as James for a long time. Then, I remember going to see a competing, A-circuit cover band playing one of our main venues. This band had an amazing rep. and we wanted to see what everyone was raving about. This band had everthing setup as side fills. There was nothing on the back line except for drums. They had a state-of-the-art effects rack and an amazing sound man out front. They had ten DBX160s and a gates.
They sounded better than any of us on that circuit at the time. I hated it however. I thought it looked like the most foriegn thing I'd ever seen. Then they asked me to sit in. OMG! The monitor mix was perfect. I could hear everything.
Seriously, my amp was never cranked up and has been modded so getting a good sound at a moderate level was never a problem. Oh also, the scene out here pretty much sucked for covers... nobody could afford a sound man so every one had to set their mix from the side of the stage and leave it. If you're ever thinking of doing a classic rock dance/cover band in San Diego, let me save you some time... don't. It pays crap out here. I won't say how bad, but a cocktail waitress once told me she'd be pissed off she she made what I was making in a night. I'd have made more money bringing beer to the patrons, rather than bringing patrons to the beer so to speak. Nice.Any way, what led to the demise of my cover band was in fact a drummer who not only played loud, but insisted firstly on micing every drum in these small rooms we were playing (we'd usually have to turn everything way down at the board and then his snare completely off). Secondly, he THEN wanted to not just hear himself, but wanted his own drums in a monitor... ALL of them. Oh yeah, and he wanted to hear them WELL... like he was listening to a CD. So of course he couldn't get his monitor loud enough without the drum mics feeding back into his montior, so he rigged everything with MIDI triggers into a DM5. He then bought his own mixer and power amp and could trigger the DM5 and crank it louder as he wanted without feedback every night to the point our stage volume was getting ridiculous on his account. I was losing my voice pushing every night. His drums were drowning out my amp and rather than mic the guitar amps just to even spread guitar in a room, we needed them to get over drums. It was stupid and he was totally inflexible. He announced if he couldn't have his monitors his way (which he didn't need for the first year we played oddly enough) he was walking. That sort of thing was the beginning of the end. He'd become buddy buddy with the bass player, the other guitarist didn't want to look for another drummer, so I left the band I started and took the name with me rather than destroy my voice. In a way he did me a huge favor as it was definitely time to move on for me. As a footnote, after years of doing the promo and all the heavy lifting and enduring the moaning of the troops, I hand them the keys to a well-oiled machine and the drummer got to be in charge and he drove it into the ground within months. They lost all the good gigs, and had to play the clubs they wouldn't have touched before. Soon after the guitarist and bassist quit, and the drummer now presides over a hopelessly mediocre band that can't get decent gigs. But God bless him... he got to keep his ridiculous monitor mix... LOL! One day he may again get to use the drum riser I helped him build (in my living room!), since he hasn't played a room large enough for it since.
Bottom line I guess is prior to the drummer's "arena style" monitoring fetish, we could hear fine and the regular Joes that came to the bar dug the whole "rock show" look.
