vesterberg.se

On Saturday, a few days ago my band Soundrise played at a wedding nearby. We were scheduled as the last event and we played for 2 hours. There were about 75 guests. They wanted us to be careful with the volume so we used digital drums live for the first time. All went well and the bride and bridegroom were very satisfied.

Playing at weddings is difficult because you have a very differentiated audience, from children to old grandma’. We make it very clear when they hire us that we primarily play rock, blues and funk. The building was very odd, a wooden house in the form of an cone (something like a cot or indian wigwam) with a fire place in the middle and many animal skins on the walls. The midrange of my bass sound disappeared and I was not really prepared for that. Yes, we made a soundcheck, but it all got worse when the guests arrived. I did not use my equalizer this evening and was not enough familiar with the Line6 Bass Pod to adjust it in a hurry.

Lesson learned: always be prepared for midrange to be sucked out. What sounds like a nice fat sound in rehearsal place, will became an undefined tone in reality. It should sound like to much mid where you stand at stage, then tone is good out among the audience. This is a real problem sometimes. The lows are unaffected but the mid or highs disappear. In a situation like this, if you boost the low frequencies or use the “smiley” setting, you will make things worse. Your instrument will sound like rumble.

Now, the good thing about the Line6 Bass POD is that you can have several alternate settings and change between them quickly. I doubt that I will ever use more than 5 different sounds during a gig. The different banks could then be alternatives for different type of auditoriums.