But who determined that path? The artist or the soundman?
The artists and the audiences. Put every real bands' ticket sales together and see if they compare with taylor swift
Agree that some artists have to have album quality because of all the fakeness but why is your standard rock bands being forced to quiet stages, IR's...from big venues to major touring acts.
Quiet stages just make more money for the venues if they serve a dual purpose (church, casinos, and bars). For the big venues that are really music specific, they aren't necessarily silent, but often have amp iso boxes or the stages are just large enough where the leakage isn't significant. Thanks to the inverse square law, if the drums are 20 feet away from the vocal mic, thats a HUGE and manageable difference in leakage than 10 feet away.
"quiet" is also relevant here. Quiet enough to not cause irreversible hearing damage from that show isn't THAT quiet, but its a lot quieter than many people, especially those deaf from playing at too high a stage volume, would believe. Quiet can easily result from the guitar player pointing his cabinet where he can hear it louder than the audience can (which is surprisingly rare at 500 and under cap venues, normally the amp is pointed at the audience and the guitarist's knees, necessitating a much louder volume than needed for monitoring). Having cymbals that the drummer can actually hear can bring shows down to sensible levels. Again, many drummers buy cymbals whos resonant peaks are higher than they can hear as they have suffered pretty severe hearing loss over the years. This results in bashing the cymbals until the part of them they CAN hear is audible to them, I've seen 126dB SPL A weighted Slow because of this at the audience position. No amount of mixing magic is going to make the band sound even remotely OK at that level as ear compression will be turning the entire performance into mud at that point.
Take a look at the new NIOSH standards for levels. If we call somewhere between that and OSHA safe, you can still have a pretty loud show, but leakage at any final SPL will still make your show sound like crap if the leakage is significant in proportion to the primary source
As I stated in one of my threads, my friends band who tours the southeast, local show in Nashville recently at one of the better venues and it's all IR's, in ears and no mic'ed amps...and not because that is what the band wanted. And as I told my friend, it sounded like shit. There was no dynamics.
I could see how they could feel like they were forced to not hit drums as hard and result in less dynamic crest factor, but given the ear's own limits before compression, a lower peak SPL show has the potential for MORE dynamics than a louder one. That's physics that just can't be broken, at least until the SPL is so low that thermal noise and quantum mechanics sets a hard floor
IMO this about (and why I said I'm an old man yelling at clouds) first and foremost convenience and modernization of not having to deal with mic'ed this or that and all that hassle that brings for the soundman. IR's, quiet stages gives the soundman complete control of dealing with just that. Anything out of that purview and they can't handle it, it's just easier not having to deal with it.
I don't know any soundmen like this. Mostly I read forums like gearslutz or pro sound web or other industry newsletters where 90% of the dinosaurs don't know what IRs are or anything past 1989. They tend to be very good at making 1995 sounds and have a lot of tricks for dealing with loud amps onstage. At the less costly venues I see soundmen who are just learning, but everything is old gear so they mic everything. I could see what you are saying happening if theyre mostly dealing with DJs and EDM though, half of them don't even know there are mics out there for anything but vocals
Again though easier doesn't make it sound better because for me, I don't want to hear the album, I want to hear the band and if there isn't bleed here or there, if everything is so controlled and separated where is the dynamics?
You get more dynamics from separation, not less (unbreakable laws of physics), but aside from that yeah...Many of us go to a show because we already have the album and if we wanted to hear that, we'd listen at home. We don't care that 45 of the vocal track stack are missing and hearing 15 guitar parts we don't see the guitarist playing takes you out of the experience of seeing them live. Take that up with the bands.
This is really similar to the "volume wars" in mixing and recording albums. The bands themselves pushed this and in the press try and blame it on the record companies or whatever, but in this age of self releases, that pretty much died as a plausible excuse 20 years ago.
To my ears though, with today's tech live music should sound better than it ever has, and on the whole it's sad that it doesn't and why I tip my hat to guys like Kevin Elson who was Journey's live engineer back in the day. Or any of the numerous soundman of the past who made those antiquated systems by todays standard sound better than anything from today.
I've said enough, good convo.
Wings Of Pegasus had a video showing an ancient Judas Priest show, where Halford was dealing with insane leakage and feedback and still somehow managed to hit the most impossible notes impeccably and did everything he could to minimize destroying the guitars with phasing coming through his vocal mic. Like the first few Black Sabbath albums, where the toms were clear as day, using only the available Keepex noise gates at the time (or I suspect some very scary, nerve wracking and trauma inducing un-undoable punch ins of silence or low pass filters) its amazing to hear what these guys could pull off at the time. But if you put a show or an album like that out today, you'd be tarred and feathered.
There are still plenty of small capacity venues where you could do things the old way, and personally I have no problem with it except when it comes to permanent, irreversible hearing damage. I think as human beings we owe that to each other not to cause that sort of crippling damage. I think the NIOSH levels are definitely safe for that and all it takes is a tiny concession from the band to accept being the loudest receiver of their own instruments and everything from the past is still the way it always was. All it takes is a little empathy, and perhaps a tiny bit of realistic modesty that the person who does it all day every day and never had a job may know a thing or two
It always cracks me up when an accountant or dentist tells a top soundman that singing with a condenser mic 4 feet in front of the drumset with a cymbal basher is the best way to go.
