What is your FOH Volume Level?

[Sleeping Giant]

To be honest I don't know what the db level is. There is a LED type display visible from the stage. It lights up from left to right and as it goes to the right the LEDs go from green to red. When you light up all the red ones the power shuts off.
I find myself playing the songs watching the meter. I adjust the pressure of the plucking depending on the LEDs. It's a terrible way to play.

 

[Sleeping Giant]

 

[Pat Harris]

I think it's much easier to maintain "reasonable volume" at gigs/shows when you don't have to compete with a loud audience. My favorite shows to play are in theaters or smaller venues where the audience is clearly there to listen and experience the music. If you have to go in and "do battle" with a crowd, the crowd will always win, and they will talk/yell louder as the volume in the room increases and everyone's ears fatigue. Granted, I don't play metal, but I think most music can rock plenty hard at 95dB, and I'll happily trade overall volume for clarity any day of the week.

 

[Downunderwonder]

To be honest I don't know what the db level is. There is a LED type display visible from the stage. It lights up from left to right and as it goes to the right the LEDs go from green to red. When you light up all the red ones the power shuts off.
I find myself playing the songs watching the meter. I adjust the pressure of the plucking depending on the LEDs. It's a terrible way to play.

your contribution to the metered level is possibly overwhelming the others. To get the audience to pay more attention you may need to bring more dynamics into play. A really quiet section can grab attention far and away better than banging into the limit.

Get the singer to sing a chorus with just the barest backbeat and the crowd will join in. Or not.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

I'm originally from Pennsylvania. Anyone familiar with PA, knows there's a Liquor Control Board that is basically a bunch of old white guys controlling the monopoly over alcohol sales in the state. Unless there's a local noise ordinance, licensed establishments fall under the LCB's completely asinine noise ordinance that states ANY sound emanating from a loudspeaker puts the venue in violation and subject to a hefty fine - three strikes and you can get your liquor license pulled.

Over the years, the LCB's enforcement arm will get a hard-on for a venue or a certain geographic area and start throwing fines around. While I've never been given a specific db level, I have been at clubs with a bar manager walking around with a db meter. I remember playing one venue where it got so bad that the un-miced kick drum drowned out my rig, which wasn't even in the house, and I couldn't get any sustain out of my bass due to how far I had to turn down. I walked over to my guitarist and did a bunch of wanky Sheehan-like taping runs in a four-chord Top 40 song as a joke for us to laugh about, because you couldn't actually hear a note I was playing. Frankly, once a venue becomes targeted, you might as well cancel all of your shows there, because someone's on a mission to keep that place from having live music.

I'm not a fan of ear-bleeding volumes, but even through a solid-state system, you need a certain amount of gain for the music to sound "good." While gain is not necessarily volume, they do have a relationship. Trying to keep an electrified band below a 90 db threshold is really not a realistic proposition, at least if you want the music to actually sound decent. Any club who has that expectation should consider only booking acoustic acts.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

I played one awful place that had a MINIMUM sound level and insisted on turning us up. We were doing a rock, blues, country, pop mix, bass drums, guitar, flute, two vocals. Tough to blend a flute at stupid rock band levels.

I later played the same place with an acoustic duo. They had a main indoor stage and an outdoor small stage, and we had to crank the acoustic duo up stupid loud to be heard over the bleed from inside. Then tried to stiff us at the end of the night.

I used to play a country music venue like that. They didn't have a db minimum per se, but I would get what I would think was a great, clean and articulate mix with a nice bottom end that would be in that sweet volume spot that I spoke about in the above post - it's not eardrum splitting, but has gain structuring that creates a nice, powerful mix and there's no forgetting there's a band on stage. Then the bar manager would ask us to turn up to some insane volume, because that's what everyone was used to. We were running a fairly decent JBL system with a couple thousand watts - not arena-level, but definitely perfect for medium-sized rooms. We just didn't have the headroom to get to the db levels that they wanted. Before the band decided to ax that place on their circuit (you played 5 hours there, which sucked), they were going to bring in one of the engineers we often worked with, who would have been bringing $40k worth of FOH...which frankly wasn't needed for that room.

 

[silence.speaks]

What drives me nuts is the bar complaning all night over the live band breaking 90 dB's and then during our breaks pumping the house bump n grind music at 110 dB's.