Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Gig Report: Feb 6th

Fearsome Poet Group 
Birds Without
Jason Perucca
To The Death

Okay show, not much audience, couldn't really get the mix to settle down for Fearsome.  Ironic, because I usually feel like I can't get a handle on Birds, but this time around seemed to be relatively easy.

It's not good to blame one's tools, but I think the acoustic properties of Underground can really bite you, with only a tiny bit of provocation.  Especially when the room is fairly empty, the "low midrange garble" leads me to build mixes where the drums are swamped in an ocean of guitar roar, and the vocals are pushed as hard as I can push them.  My theory is that the intelligibility killing low mid buildup (and the fact that the room reverb smears every transient into elongated mush) makes for situations where you can hear that something is present in the mix, but not actually hear what it's really doing, musically.  The only way to get separation is big differences in apparent level - and that makes for LOUD.  (It also means that something inevitably gets sacrificed on the altar of something else...)

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