On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 12:16:37 -0700, Shawn wrote:

Did a show last night at a very swanky club in Denver.
They had the house music cranked insanely loud with that nasty
techno-dance crap and they wouldn't turn it off for us to do a
sound-check.
Unfortunatly I'm not experienced enough to do a sound-check without
hearing my system and our current sound-person is the drummer's
girlfriend who, bless her heart, is working her tail off but is way to
inexperienced to mix from scratch.
As a result we fought most of the night with feedback and generally
bad sound. The more she tried to fix things the worse things got.
Between sets my brother and I troubleshot and fixed some things.
One thing I found was that I didn't have a good enough signal coming
out of the mains eq so she had to crank channel gain knobs to get
enough volume, which, of course contributed to feedback problems and
distortion/clipping.
This is an issue that I would likely have noticed and fixed when I did
a real soundcheck.
The rational/professional side of me thinks that if a club isn't
professional enough to give us the opportunity to make our product
sound as good as it can then I just won't play there. At risk here is
speakers that can be blown, vocal cords that can be blown, a
reputation that can be blown...
This is really a no-brainer to me, but then I'm coming from the
professional musician's viewpoint not the professional (or
un-professional as the case may be) club owner perspective.
Will this kind of approach/limitation/demand limit the clubs we can
play in?
Is this that common?

Thanks to all,
Shawn

My band actually wrote a song called 'soundchecking' for these situations.
It starts with drums, then bass comes in etc. The arrangement is pretty
loose so we can jam around until the sound comes together. We announce the
song as 'soundchecking', and the audience seems to get the idea.

We try to get as much done as possible while the DJ is playing beforehand
too (just play over the music, but as little as possible).

Most gigs we are set up and soundchecked way before the place opens
though, that really is the only professional way. If it's a venue that
knows anything about live music there will be a schedule for all bands
soundchecks so support bands etc are ready too.