Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
As an interesting question, how many live venues actually have a decent sound system? Something like, say, the Casbah? Is that considered a decent system or would you have to basically bring everything you have in?
In San Diego, at least, most clubs featuring live music also have their own systems. Most of these systems *suck*. I haven't been into the Casbah, so I'm not sure what their system is and can't comment on it. But, if you go to somewhere like, say, Dick's Last Resort, you can hear their Peavey system making peoples' eardrums bleed. Not to say that all Peavey systems are bad -- that particular one could just use quite a bit of EQ. Same goes for Xanth when it was open -- I engineered there for a while for some spare weekend cash, and *ugh* .. between the musicians who couldn't tune and play their instruments/equipment (shit in, shit out), the cheezeball PA, and the screaming teenagers, I rarely went home without a splitting headache.
I lived in virginia for a while, and when I was out there a friend and I owned a sound company, complete with truck. We dragged it out all the time. Most of the shows I did were at venues which didn't have their own PA (or their PA sucked royally), so I brought our rig in. In many cases, I spent more on one rack of amplifiers than they spent on the entire system. All this for between $300 and $800 a night, dependent on the level of equipment needed. The nice part about it was that the venues in VA actually paid their talent a decent amount of money -- they could afford calling us in for top-notch reinforcement. Clubs in san diego are too cheap to pay artists what they deserve, and consequently the local music scene in san diego sucks donkey balls. It's a sad state of affairs all around -- cheezeball sound systems in all the clubs and not enough room to bring your own PA, not getting paid what the band deserves, and just an overall abundance of poor musicians.
c'est la vie, I suppose. -kelsey -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
