ever think you've had a bad show but turns out it was okay?

mrkreuzschlitz · #1 12-21-2008, 12:44 AM

My band just played a show tonight,

and I'm not gonna lie. We blew hard. We're pretty good, if I may say so myself, but the sound guy decided to mic me instead of going D.I., which made my stage volume a whole lot less than it normally is, and then our guitarists were way quiet. He didn't mic anything but the bass drum, the two guitars, bass, and vocals, and I couldn't hear a thing out of the monitors. I thought we did pathetic. I asked some friends for a straight up, honest opinion, and they said we didn't sound that bad. Based off of all these different unbiased opinions, and a video of the gig, I guess we weren't that bad.

Have you ever had a show where you thought you absolutely bombed it and then it turned out it wasn't that bad?

Ampeg SVT · #2 12-21-2008, 12:45 AM

Oh yeah...

dustdbass6 · #3 12-21-2008, 12:57 AM

I've had a show similar to yours where someone else did the sound other than ourselves and did it poorly. But people still dug it.

We've also played shows when we hadn't practiced in maybe a month or two and we all got a little too tipsy. I could've sworn we were terrible, but as it turns out, all our solos were more fun to the crowd than usual. I think people are easy to please in the right environment.

mrkreuzschlitz · #4 12-21-2008, 01:07 AM

Oh we never run our sound. Its the typical local music thing, the venue provides everything but instruments and people, then a bunch of bands play back to back.

It really sucks, and a scout for a booking agency was there. Its disheartening because our practice right before that went amazing. We were as tight as could be, everyone sounded good, then we showed up,

and it just fell downhill.

CaptainWampum · #5 12-21-2008, 01:08 AM

I think that when you know your own material head to toe it takes less to make you think it's bad. While you feel like after every mistake you made the whole crowd is thinking about it, the chance is that they didn't notice. This happens to me a lot. It's just over familiarity with your own music.

modulusman · #6 12-21-2008, 12:02 PM

How does the fact that the soundman micing you make you less loud than using a DI? The fact that everyones volume onstage was low probably meant that the soundman was able to get a good mix out front.

gonzorob · #7 12-21-2008, 12:17 PM

happens all the time. We have about one show per month that we all are happy with. The rest are never quite up to our standards but when we go back and listen we see that we are being to hard on ourselves.

its just part of being a musician.

groooooove · #8 12-21-2008, 01:24 PM

this happens to me VERY often. i think its more common among jam bands..

theres a famous story about jerry garcia getting so pissed after a show he pushed either bob weir or phil lesh down a flight of stairs (i forget wich it was.) the next day they listened back and it turned out to be one of their best shows of the year..

megadan · #9 12-21-2008, 01:27 PM

Yeah, it happens all the time. Often we play a show that we all think is utter shite, and it turns out that everyone loved it. Other times we play a great feeling set that comes out mediocre.

Bard2dbone · #10 12-21-2008, 02:49 PM

With my old band. the keyboard player had a 16-channel PA as his mixer. So most of the time we just all went through his mixer and he ran the PA from the stage. The problem would come when we'd play a club where the soundguy was a control freak and would flip out over us setting up to not use his system at all.

I remember one in particular because the soundguy in question went by the same nickname as one of mine. I kept thinking people were talking to me when they were talking to him. He ran extra mics to most, but not all of the places we already had mics. So in addition to our normal setup, he'd mic'd the vocals, guitar, and half the drums...but not the bass, the keyboards or the other half of the drums.

Bad bad suckage ensued.

Except that, counter to the subject of this thread, EVERYONE thought we sounded way off. And the sound guy was happy about it. He said it was our fault for trying to run our sound from the stage. We thought it was his fault for running the kick drum, floor toms, left side cymbals, and backup vocals at eleven and everthing else down...and turning up his master volume if we tried to regulate it from the stage.

The night ended with us badly mixed at nuclear devastation volumes.

Bad bad suckage.

mrkreuzschlitz · #11 12-21-2008, 09:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by modulusman

How does the fact that the soundman micing you make you less loud than using a DI? The fact that everyones volume onstage was low probably meant that the soundman was able to get a good mix out front.

My stage volume was pretty quiet,

making me "less loud." I use a pre/power setup, so I could keep my master set to where he wants it and then turn my power amp up from there, simple as that.

Honestly, we played two new songs that we had just practiced that day, and apart from not doing too hot with them, it wasn't a bad show. I just watched a video of it.

Definitely not the best,
but not as bad as I thought.

mrkreuzschlitz · #12 12-21-2008, 09:07 PM

Oh, another thing.

Our style requires a little bit of a bass heavy mix,
and from the audiences standpoint you could barely hear the bass, even on stage.
So, in one of our songs where everybody comes in depending on me,
they couldn't hear the notes I was playing.

At the same time, the sound guy was used to doing death metal bands,
so go figure.

sonic assassin · #13 12-21-2008, 09:19 PM

just a couple weeks ago. we were struggling the entire time.. felt like it was never going to end.

we stop off stage looking like hell and the people we expect to tell us the truth said it was a really great show. we were amazed.

theunknowndude · #14 12-22-2008, 04:28 AM

yes,...

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu...deoID=48770643

my bass solo I did yesterday...
was so dehydrated and waited 5 hours to get onto the stage, pretty much fumbled the whole middle section wondering how I was going to get it all back on track! somehow pulled off something half decent and everyone clapped and didn't boo me off stage

ilikethump · #15 12-22-2008, 07:02 AM

Yep.....

We had a show where the freaking monitors weren't working. As in, couldn't hear **** besides bass and drum - no backing track, no vocals, no guitar work, no keys (asides from what was bouncing around from the PA).

That was nerve wracking.

Apparently we weren't bad though.

AlembicPlayer · #16 12-22-2008, 07:18 AM

I stopped judging a long time ago when I realized my perspective is just that..mine. I can only trust if I had a good time and experience or not...how it came off or sounded to anyone else is not for me to judge.

I swear, it's always been the opposite of my experience anyway..when I thought it was the best show ever, nobody seemed to notice...when I thought it sucked, people would tell me it was the best show ever.

I gave up judging.
Like I said, the only thing I can trust is if I had fun and wasn't fighting my own gear.(which is somehow directly connected to me having fun!)

the stage and sound.. sometimes it's combat conditions and you have to just push thru to the other side. It's not always ideal conditions, so keeping it going under any circumstances without flinching is what it becomes all about.

cheers!

Eilif · #17 12-22-2008, 11:28 AM

This happened to me all the time in my last band. I would finish a set knowing that we had sucked hard, and people would come up, not even intoxicated, and say that we did a great job.

Of course sometimes it works in the reverse. I went to see that band without me after I had left (a friendly breakup). I had always really liked the music we had played and the tunes we had written and was looking forward to being able to experience it from the audience. Unfortunately they had not gotten a new bassist yet, and to top it off, they sounded disconnected and really terrible. fter the gig one of the first things that was said to me was. "I felt really good out there". I didn't have the heart to tell him what it sounded like from the audience.

lunarpollen · #18 12-22-2008, 11:43 AM

As a rule, when playing a gig, I think it sucks more than it actually does. Going from people's comments and the occasional recordings, I know it always seems significantly worse from my immediate perspective than it does for someone in the crowd. It's from a combination of things, but I think most of it comes from the fact that when onstage I am paying most attention to my own performance and I notice all my hideous foul-ups and mistakes. But out front, often the whole mix + the overall goodness of the tunes distracts from or covers up a lot of my flubs.

ehque · #19 12-22-2008, 12:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bard2dbone

SNIP

Bad bad suckage ensued.

SNIP

The night ended with us badly mixed at nuclear devastation volumes.

I've learnt early on that a bad soundman is the ONE reason why you/me will sound bad on stage.

Never piss off your soundman, and pray you get a good one every time you play.

CatfishStudios · #20 12-22-2008, 12:29 PM

I played an old timey bluegrass acoustic gig, 2 guitarist and a hand percussionist...."rootbound congregation" Drums miced and acoustics direct to p/a ...the stage was inset into a wall...and the monitors were in front of us pointing out...I could not hear my guitar nor the other guitar, but i could hear vocals and drums...so I just went through the motions without hearing my axe. Turns out the other guitarist couldnt hear either, and we all felt like it was a horrible show. Singing backup harmonies when you cannot hear the tune, is frightening to say the least. After the show we were complemented on how good we sounded, and invited back anytime we like. "shrugs"