indie music Archives - Aaron J. Trumm

Start With the Drums: Cleaning Up Your Stage Sound from the Ground Up

This article on cleaning up your stage sound was written originally for the blog at Carvin Amps and Audio. I repost it here, and encourage you to check out Carvin’s amazing line of products! Also – notification: I sometimes use affiliate links. Some purchases may earn me a commission! 🙂

We’ve talked at length about why you might want to turn down on stage, and how that can improve your stage sound overall. This conversation usually centers around guitar cabinets. There is ample justification for that, as an out-of-control guitar can be problematic, especially in a small room.

But the ongoing volume war doesn’t always start with the guitarist. After all, there is another instrument that gets pretty loud and at almost every frequency.

No doubt you guessed it’s the drum kit. Drums are by nature loud, explosive, transient beasts, and that’s without adding in the cymbals. Add in the wildness of a typical rock-n-roll drummer, and things can get out of hand fast.

It’s no wonder then that guitar, bass, and vocal P.A. usually end up cranked up to eleventy twelve.

So, one of the best ways you can create a clean, solid stage sound that is audible, tolerable, balanced, artful – and still powerful – is to start from the ground up with the drums.

Cleaning Up Your Stage Sound: Volume First

It’s probably obvious, but the first thing you want to do is talk to your drummer about volume control. The best of the best can keep a solid beat and get a good tone at a variety of volumes. If your drummer has this skill, great! If not, try working on it in rehearsal. Try practicing fully acoustic with no vocal amplification and task the drummer with finding a way to groove so you can still hear.

If a room is particularly small and it proves difficult to cut enough volume with playing technique, try changing sticks. Softer, lighter sticks or even bundle sticks may do the trick. Brushes may even work depending on your genre, but that will obviously change your sound quite a bit.

Then again, adjusting your vibe to a space might be the perfect way to get it right. Experiment with different set ups – an all acoustic setup with hand drums, cajon, or any number of alternate rhythm sections might work, for example.

In many cases, you may just want to bring smaller drums. Opt for the 16” kick instead of the 22”, the lighter snare, and one small tom, as opposed to the full monster rig you might bring to a big stage. Or – gasp – you could use electronic drums (sometimes?).

It’s Not All Volume

Raw volume is just the beginning, and you can go a long way with simply adjusting the pure loudness of your drummer. But just as in studio mixing, it’s not all about fader levels. You can get a lot more bang for your buck in a space if you look at competing frequencies and raw noise.

First, consider the cymbals. A little bit of high frequency sizzle can go a long way in a small room, so think about reducing the size and number of cymbals, and again, help the drummer practice various ways of playing them.

Next consider the ring of the drums. Left unchecked, many drumheads resonate and ring out for a long time, and while that may be desirable at times, you can tighten up your sound by dampening them. Judicious use of moon gels, wash clothes, foam rubber dampers, and other accoutrement can help tremendously.

With drums hitting and dying back, you not only leave room for other instruments to cut through, you also stand a better chance of being tight rhythmically, as room reflections won’t make such a soup of the beat.

During set up, spend time tuning the drums to the room so that resonances are in check, windows aren’t buzzing, chairs aren’t travelling, and so on. And finally, manage creaks and pops and wiggles with proper floor covering, kick pedal lubrication, and so on. The more you can remove excess noise, the more room you have for musical elements.

Worth It In The End

It’s not a lot of bands who take the extra time to address how drums work in a room, but when its done, everything else tends to fall in place. Guitars can sit in the mix, bass can thump, and vocals can cut through without over-compressing. Drums are really the key to cleaning up your stage sound.

In the end it may take some extra thought, planning, and effort, but starting with drums to clean up your stage sound will definitely be worth it – even for the drummer.

If you have questions or want to talk, just hit me up on Facebook @AaronJTrumm – or email me aaron @ aarontrumm.com

Proper Stage Volume: Why (and How) You Might Want to Turn Your Amp Down on Stage

This article on proper stage volume was written originally for the blog at Carvin Amps and Audio. I repost it here, and encourage you to check out Carvin’s amazing line of products! Also – notification: I sometimes use affiliate links. Some purchases may earn me a commission! 🙂

It’s no secret house sound engineers fight with guitarists about proper stage volume for amps, especially in small venues. It may even be a bit of a cliché to mention it. “Turn it down!” often becomes “I’ll turn it down for you!” and “I need it louder!” turns into “I’ll just sneak over here and turn this up…”.

Whichever side you fall on, it turns out both sides have valid concerns, and everybody just wants to achieve the best sound possible. So, let’s look at how and why you might achieve a good balance with house sound, while still achieving the great tone you’re after (and maybe not having to take forever setting up!)

The Can’t Hear Myself War

Here’s the crux of the situation on a stage, especially where a loud rock band and a small venue are concerned: Everyone need to hear themselves (and each other), but no one can!

This actually usually starts with the drums, which are almost always too loud for a room. We’ll tackle how to start at the bottom with this problem in another article, but suffice it to say, if you can tame your kit, the sound engineer/guitar feud will be easier to manage.

Focusing on the guitars, the major problem the sound engineer faces is guitars tend to overwhelm vocals, keys, and other similar elements very quickly. Since the P.A. is the only amplification these elements have, if the guitar amps defeat that, there’s no way to hear anything else in the room.

But The Tone!

The best way to handle that from a purely house audio standpoint is to eliminate the guitar amps, and put the guitars directly into the P.A. This means everyone on stage can get what they need in their monitors, and the house mix can be controlled.

Unfortunately, that can all but ruin the tone many guitarists seek, and that can destroy a band’s signature sound.

To make matters harder, most guitarists achieve their tone by “opening up” the tubes in their amps – by turning them up to eleven. In this scenario, when the engineer asks you to turn your amp down, it means changing the tone.

But in almost every venue outside of a big stage, this volume level will fill the room, blast the audience’s ears, and make the mix impossible to achieve. Even amps that are completely absent from the P.A. mix can’t be overwhelmed in many cases, which means if you turn up to eleven, you’ve just defined your sound as “guitars only, with a guy lip syncing to nothing at the front of the stage”.

If that’s not enough on why you might want to consider lowering your stage volume, consider a few other factors:

Your ears – Hearing loss can occur after only 2 hours of exposure to 80-85 DBs. A typical guitar cabinet measures 115db one meter from the speaker.
The singer – Maybe vocals aren’t your concern, but if your singer can’t hear, they’ll scream. If they scream, they’ll lose their voice, and your next gig may be cancelled.
The audience – In a small venue, guitar amps can overwhelm and hurt audience’s ears quickly, which may cause them to disengage.
Your band – If the guitars are too loud, the bass will turn up. The drums will play louder. The keyboardist will crank the volume. Eventually everything will sound distorted and no one will know who’s who.

Achieving The Balance

So, what’s the solution? You may not want to hear this – but turn it down. Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can reduce your overall volume without ruining your tone.

Elevate Your Amp – If your number one problem is hearing yourself, start by elevating your amp closer to ear level, or pointing it toward you.
Use a smaller or lower power cabinet or a preamp pedal– In many smaller venues, you can opt for a smaller amp such as Carvin Audio’s V112E extension cabinet, or use a preamp pedal like Carvin’s VLD1 Legacy Drive – or this little badass:

Use a post-phase-inverter master volume (aka PPIMV) – An amp using this technology places the master volume after after the phase inverter, allowing you to keep a cranked-up tone while controlling output volume.
Use an attenuator – Patching a power attenuator between the amp and speaker cabinet can also help reduce volume while maintaining tone.
Use an amp shield or baffle – If you’re not having problems hearing yourself, you can use a shield to reduce overall stage volume while maintaining your tone.
Point it back (or to the side) – Known as “backwashing” or “sidewashing”, pointing your cabinet toward the back or side wall may work to reduce in-your-face volume and help tame the sound engineer’s mix.
Try a speaker simulator – Famously used by Rush’s Alex Lifeson, speaker simulators take input from an amplifier and feed it directly to the sound system.

It’s Possible

The encouraging thing is, it’s more than possible to achieve a best-of-both worlds, opened up, high quality guitar sound on stage, while still leaving room for the rest of the band and the sound engineer to help you put your best foot forward. For more discussion on proper stage volume, check out How To Improve Your Live Shows By Reducing Your Stage Volume, on this blog.

And let us know your best techniques for keeping the balance on stage!