Re: John's voice

Steve Luongo has been following our posts, and asked that I pass this on to the
group:

>He couldn't  find a decent balance in the Fillmore, which George tells me is
>normally  a very good sounding hall.  Santa Cruz was better, but then they
>had all manner of problems with his bass rack.  Seems like it just shouldn't
be that hard...>>

You're right!

JAE was running a 240 rig with step down transformers.  Which means he was set
up for English power and used the transformers to convert the power to US.  The
problem was that a lot of the places we played had dodgie power and that caused
more problems than you can imagine.  This time we're have a 120 rig built and
that should solve that problem at least.

>Part of the problem may have been the fact that the sound men were dealing
>with
>different equipment at the various venues.  With reference to the last tour,
>Steve Luongo mentioned in a recent article from EQ (vol 7, issue 3, 1996):
"In order to keep costs down, we are not carrying much of our equipment with us.
Basically, we're carrying John's monitor system and backline, and using house
production.  Of course, there are pros and cons to this approach, but at least
you know that the system you are using-good or bad- will be tuned to the room"

Hind sight is always 20/20.  The key phrase in that statement is "good or
bad." and we encountered our share of both.  In all fairness to JAE I thought
he sang better than he has in a long time.  Cutting down on the ciggies
helped  but once you've blown your voice out because of a weak sound system the
next few nights suffer until you get it back.
If your voice is damaged even for a day or 2 it makes you back off the mic
because you're unsure of what you can/can't do and this creates a new problem
for the soundman.  He now has to turn up the vocal mic (in this case John's) and
the mic picks up all sorts of other sound from the stage.  Now imagine a mic
that's in front of JAE's rig (Little Manhattan).  That mic is going to pick up
not only JAE's sound but my drums as well.  There are those that would say a
limiter or compressor would have helped but the truth is that when that mic
opened up the stage volume would "bleed" through and the sound would suffer.
The simple answer is "play bigger places."  The truth is that there are no
excusses only solutions and we will try to find answers to the problems we had
on the winter tour.  One answer we're considering hauling our own production
(sound and lights).  But
that limits the size of the places we can play.  They will have to be bigger
venues because a club is not going to strike their PA so we can set ours up.
We'll see what happens on the 2nd leg of the tour later this year.  
Good or bad I am glad to hear the input.  It helps us be a better band and
put on a better show.  The reason we do what we do is because all of you keep
coming out to see it. We want you to enjoy the show so if you have feelings one
way or the other our band thinks they're important. 

In defense of Steve Eigner (FOH soundman) I have the DATS from the board from
each show and the mixes were all fine so in that regard he did a good job.  I
think the biggest problem that SE had was the volume of the band in general.
Let's face it you can't land a 747 in a night club.  

Thank you for your input,

Steve Luongo