Gig last night

koneguitarist

Bassists wife had a birthday party last night with a load of people round, nice laid back atmosphere in their house. And we did the entertainment. 

Now the point is I was asked how difficult is it to play at such a low volume? 

Now we are not a loud band by any means, but it's something we find very natural and easy to to do. 

The band set up in the corner of an L shaped living room, and we used the monitors which are active 1x8" W Audio speakers (cheap as hell) as PA and only acoustic and vocals in it. 

The drummer used a light set of hot rod sticks, which reduce volume quite a bit as well. The only other thing we had was confidence to play quietly. 

It was so nice playing low volume that I heard so many things that the band did and made me realise how well they can play. 

All in all a very enjoyable small gig. 

lustycourtier

Yup, its a good test of any band. If you can play so people can almost talk, you can play very loud!

lloyd

Nice, wesound better when loud and distorted-hides a mulltitude of sins!

Phil_aka_Pip

We played an Old Folks Home last week - a lot of them recognised the crap we played, from when we were young. I used my 5W combo with the vol pot half way up. Anyway, sound-wise it was excellent, and the only FoH we used was a wedge on the floor facing away from the drummer - the rest of us heard its spill no problem, and we all heard each other.

Whereas yesterday in the pub, with 2 off FoH speakers on poles and me using my AC30, it was hard to hear the vocals, and as alluded to in another thread, hard to get the AC30 sounding "right".

english_bob

Sounds like a fun gig.

Playing quietly can be a real challenge, particularly if you want everything balanced so you can "go loud" when you need to, since the extra volume "on tap" means having to reduce your own volume by picking softly, meaning that any mis-hit notes tend to end up very loud. My band (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, drums) seems to get a lot of comments on how quietly we play and rehearse (probably helps that the other practice rooms are being used by really heavy rock bands and one lot that do loud, shouty punk covers of all sorts of things we don't expect).

It's good practice though- like you've said, it reveals quite a lot about how good (or not) the players in the band are, and it makes sound engineers very happy not to have to boost up all their levels over your loud stage sound to get a balanced mix. Good use of dynamics can make your band sound much more interesting in a live setting too. Loud bits can only really be effective if they're contrasted with quiet parts.

Teetonetal

Playing quietly is all about the quality (willingness) of your drummer...