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Two questions in one here. Often when rehearsing or at gigs, I'm asked to turn up my volume "'Cos we can't hear you!" when the band is already quite loud. Very rarely will the others turn down to achieve a re-balance, where we'd be able to hear each other better anyway.

First question: Why does this happen?

Second: What can be done about the volume battle, as when I do turn up, it's not long until someone else goes even louder "'Cos I can't hear myself now!" My only solution so far: wear earplugs or go home...

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19

This is common for mainly two reasons:

  1. Most musicians are clueless about gain structures, electronics, and acoustics.
  2. It is easier to turn one knob up than every other knob down.

The solution:

Wear ear plugs, use in ears, or just live with it. Chances are you can't change these people. If you feel you can then try to reason when them.

The situation is very difficult though, specially if people share monitors.

About the best you can do is get in ears or at least individual wedges, each with individual mixing controls(See personal monitor mixes).

Personal monitor mixers are the way to go because it allows each person to adjust their own mix.

Most musicians do not have a good enough knowledge to know that X, Y, and Z are too loud and they should play quieter.

Most of the time the bass player wants more bass, the guitarist more guitar, and the vocalists want more of their own vocals. The drummer is just beating the drums as hard as he can, regardless.

What makes a great band is when everyone plays together as one. If they can't hear you, then it means they must all play quieter assuming you actually have a decent level of volume...

It only takes one person to screw up everything. If he is playing too loud, each other person will not be able to hear themselves and play harder or turn up resulting in a cycle until it's just noise.

If your drummer is playing acoustic drums then it is near impossible to practice or even do small gigs if he doesn't realize how much he is hurting the music by playing too hard. Not only does it cause the problem you are having but also you lose dynamics.

If you can't talk to these guys about it and reason with them then best I can say is find a better band... cause it won't get any better and you'll probably just end up deaf(which only contributes to the problem).

If you like playing at a low volume and they don't then you are not compatible with them, find a group of guys that you are compatible with and you'll have more fun. Not only will you be able to enjoy the music better you'll also progress better (you'll hear more of the music and less of the noise (distortion, room reflections, etc...). Since this happens exponentially, everyone will improve. (i.e., not only will you hear better everyone else will too)

Note that having less volume does lose some energy as obviously there is more energy in loud music. This is where having a proper setup comes into play. You can have some of the energy without the noise and deafening levels. (EQ is a big part of this. e.g., EQ the kick and snare so they don't contribute useless noise to the spectrum which will muddy it up making it harder to hear other instruments.

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    @Archival: Different musicians need different things to achieve their optimal performance. If Bob can give a decent performance given the house mix, and no other mix would improve things, and if Joe could give the same performance as Joe using the house mix, but could give an even better performance with something else, I see no reason to regard Joe as an inferior musician; I'd say that if practical he should be given whatever mix would allow him to give the best performance. BTW, another problem I'd see with using the house mix is delay. – supercat Mar 27 '13 at 15:59
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    Some types of audio effects induce an unavoidable delay between when the musician produces a sound and when it comes out the mix. If the audience hears sounds 100ms late, they're not going to notice, but a monitor mix which is delayed by 100ms would for many musicians be at best useless. They may be able to tune it out, but if that's going to be the case why bother with it. Better I'd think to have a zero-delay monitor mix, have a sound guy tell the musicians in rehearsal what they need to do for a good final mix, and have musicians perform so the monitor sounds like it did in rehearsal. – supercat Mar 27 '13 at 16:13
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    @Archival: How many venues have acoustics such that the character of the house mix perfectly matches the character of the sound heard by the audience? If one determines that in some venue a woman's vocals need to be boosted by 1.2dB to counteract the fact that e.g. the material is more reverberant at lower frequencies, I would think one should change the house mix without changing the monitors. Boosting the vocalist's mic gain by 1.2dB in the monitor mix would likely make her sing more quietly, counteracting the desired effect (if the soloist wouldn't react to the monitor, why have them?) – supercat Mar 27 '13 at 19:27
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    @supercat, Archival, please continue this discussion in Chat -- you can make your own room and reference it here. Comments are not for extended discussion. – NReilingh Mar 27 '13 at 21:36
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    Great answer, but I really can't agree to house-mix-on-monitor. The "more me" syndrome is perfectly fine, because in general you need more information about your own instrument's output than the audience is supposed to hear, in order to produce a perfect result. To quote Jascha Heifetz: "I play as many wrong notes as anyone, but I fix them before most people can hear them." – this works very well on violin and many other acoustic instruments, because you naturally hear yourself both louder and particularly closer than anything else. Only a bad musician would get too quiet because of this. – leftaroundabout Mar 31 '13 at 21:40
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In most cases the problem is the drummer. If he/she a hard hitter with a massive drum set, there will be little you can do. This problem got aggravated by the fact that most cheap to medium-level drum sets are optimized to be as loud as possible (regardless that they otherwise sound like crxxp). This is based on the myth that "loud sells better". The kid sits down in Guitar Center, bangs on the different sets and the loudest one makes him/her feel most like a rock star so that's what they buy. A few things to try

  1. Talk to the drummer. See if he/she can persuaded into working on technique, using swivel sticks, get a nice sounding but quieter set and just in general acknowledge the problem.
  2. Bring an SPL meter to practice. Agree on a "not to exceed" number and then stop and take a breather when you exceed it.
  3. Check out the guitar players set up: make sure it's not pointed at his/her ankles but his/her ears are the closest to the cone.
  4. Play around with setup. Every player should be closest to his own amp/instrument. During rehearsal circles work quite well since you can see each other and my moving in/out you can adjust a little the volume of the other guys.
  5. More gear is typically not the answer. I you need monitors (except vocals) during rehearsal your doing it wrong. A full fledged 3-piece system (mains PA, multiple monitors, backline amps) is really only required for large gigs (I'd say 500+ people). The added complexity typically does more harm than good.
  6. Try an acoustic rehearsal as a practice exercise. No amps allowed. You just have to figure out how to play together and make it sound good without using knobs.
  7. Have a discussion about ear plugs. Playing with ear plugs is like going to the Louvre in Paris and looking at the Mona Lisa with sun glasses on since some idiot turned up the lights too much. It just doesn't make sense.

It can be done. I'm currently privileged enough to play with a drummer who has a performance degree from Berklee and, yes, he can play VERY quietly and still groove. Being able to control your volume can get you a lot of gigs!!

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Always ensure you have one of two things:

  • personal monitors (either wedges or in-ear)
  • your own amp (effectively a monitor)

And then make sure the house sound is projected from speakers in front of or to the side of you, so you don't hear them.

This also allows you to be as quiet as you want on stage.

I prefer a volume on stage that allows me to talk to the rest of the band without really having to shout, but as our audience will attest, we are a loud band. We just have very precise mixes in our wedges, eg I have 30% drums and synths, 50% my guitar and 20% vocals from my singer. Our lead singer has just drums, synths and a bit of his own vox. The bass player just has drums and bass.

This allows us to adjust our individual preferences without messing up each other's on-stage presence, while letting the sound engineer sort out our house sound.

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  • This idea takes things to a new level -DOWN - I think it's a great idea that the stage volume is low, and the whole lot gets sent to the audience via the p.a.It's going to take a lot of persuading to get everyone to play down on backline, and EVERYTHING needs to be DI-d, so actually only the vox needs to be in the foldback mix, unless the band is spread out on a wide stage.I don't think this is a practical solution without a great sound engineer (I used to do this job), as it's impossible to sort it out from behind the p.a.Great answer. – Tim Apr 12 '13 at 18:30
  • In some venues it is impossible, yes, but we tend to work with very good sound engineers. We play most gigs almost entirely DI'ed. My new Line6 HD500 is a pretty good amp sim! – Doktor Mayhem♦ Apr 12 '13 at 23:37
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A nice experiment: in the rehearsal room, you will likely play in a circle with your amp behind you. Try for a change to place your amp in front of you, at the other end of the circle. That way you receive your own noise like normally your bandmates do, and from the good side of your ears: the front (our ears are designed to pick up most of the sound from the front). This experiment works for amplified instruments only of course. I can almost guarantee that most of the players will be in shock of how loud they actually play.

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The louder the volume gets, the harder it becomes telling apart your own voice. So you want to turn your amp up.

My Mackie mixer manual states (with regard to stage monitors via AUX outputs):

"This is usually the knob you turn up when the lead singer glares at you, points at his stage monitor, and sticks his thumb up in the air. (It would follow that if the singer stuck his thumb down, you'd turn the knob down, but that never happens.)"

The only thing helping against this is discipline. Of course, you can also use earplugs for realigning the volume. This helps until everyone has them, and the neighbors aren't so lucky.

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  • I really like the Mackie manuals - they're realistic. Must have been written by musos! I've been known (but only to me) to turn up the voclalist's monitor so that it is too loud for them. At that point, they usually back off and equilibrium is regained at least on the house p.a. – Tim Apr 23 '17 at 18:07
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I am in a loud band that performs 6 nights a week. I am a singer, drummer, keyboardist and bassist. I support everyone in my band, however, the loudness begins with a heavy hitting drummer. I absolutely hate when people use in-ear monitor systems as a solution! THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION TO UNPROFESSIONAL AND LOUD STAGE VOLUME! If your drummer is too loud then you must sound proof first. Buy a portable drum cage, or other soundproofing. Loud stage volume comes from selfish players. No need to ask the bassist or guitarist to turn down if they can't enjoy themselves from loud drums. AGAIN! IN EARS ARE NOT THE SOLUTION ESPECIALLY IF YOUR ARTIST VOICES ARE NOT STRONG. Being too loud makes your singers work harder. They can't explore and use their voices to its greatest potential because they always have to push it to 10 every time the band plays. Educate yourselves.

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  • Sounds like this comes from bitter experience! I've left bands for these very reasons. Hmm, drummer in a cage sounds like a good move - hope he isn't given the key...probably couldn't hear himself sing anyway! Never mind IEMs, get your drummer to wear a hearing aid. Or leave. – Tim May 1 '17 at 15:58
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It's always the drummers fault crap. Just like the other musicians rehearsal to hear their own equipment and usually everybody can hear the drums but when these rehearsal places have a drum Riser with the drums up high and everything is down on the floor and there is no monitor how does anybody expect the drummer to hear everything that's going on without hearing nothing but a bunch of white noise. That's why I love the in in-ear monitors cuz I can isolate different sounds the crappy rehearsal mix makes playing a grilling task

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    Not really a realistic answer. After playing with literally hundreds of different bands, the drummer is more often to blame than any other individual. True, it may be because he has to play louder to hear himself, because the rest of the players aren't capable of playing at anything less than flat out, but then it just becomes a viscious circle. If one needs monitors then it's either because it's a huge venue, or the set up is wrong, making everyone feel the need to turn up even more. Apart, I've played with too many drummers who simply cannot play quietly - partly because, as I was told (cont – Tim Apr 23 '17 at 17:13
  • by the drummer two gigs ago 'my hearing is really not too good any more'. But also partly because some drum kits are inherently loud. I play drums too, and the Yamaha kit I used (borrowed) last week was VERY difficult to play quietly! – Tim Apr 23 '17 at 17:16

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