What was the sound like at gigs back in the days before big PA systems.

steven70

Hello,

I have the occasional debate with a friend about front of house sound quality at gigs back in the days before the done thing became to play quietly on stage and have everything through the PA.

I don't want to get into what is better or worse (well not too much) but...

I started going to gigs in the 80s, when PAs were pretty well developed but it was still acceptable to play loud on stage-  so if you were in the front few rows (or most of the venue if it was Motorhead) you'd get mostly backline. 

But- does anyone remember going to shows where it was vocals only through PA and whacking great guitar amps?

I've heard it argued that 'the sound was crap and no one could hear a thing'- but this seems at odds with some of the blistering live recordings from these times. In contrast with the sterile but 'nice' sounding stuff I hear today (OK not going to go there, must not  go there)

My question then - anyone here go to see bands back in (say) late 60s into 70s and what did it sound like out front?
Particularly interested in venues larger than your pub/small club type thing.
How loud were things and was it crap, amazing (or as I suspect,some place in between depending on where you were standing)?

Any thoughts and memories appreciated!

Cheers

Edit- And this should not be limited to heavy RAWK gigs.

Caffeine_Vampire

Watching. 

koneguitarist

Yes, very unbalanced depending on where you were in audience. I played in a band using an Bluesbreaker 2 x12 combo cranked up, other guitarist using something equally as loud, drummer was not mic'd and could not hear his own drums no matter how hard he hit them. 

We are still using same design amps and guitars, same old drums, yet its only the PA systems that have gotten truly better …………...thank god! 

sev112

Sorry, did somebody say something.....??

Roland

The sound was pretty poor. Backline, plus Wem columns for the singer.

When mixing desks came in PAs got louder. Backline got mic’d up, but the PA was often quite distorted because everything was pushed to the limits.

In places like the Marquee or the early Friars club I used to stand at the edge of the stage where I could hear the backline. In larger places such as town halls, or the de Montfort hall in Leicester, I’d stand by the mixing desk.

The sound for the band wasn’t much better. There was little in the way of vocal monitoring. I got to sing through Edgar Broughton’s mic during one gig, and I could hardly hear myself above the band.

PolarityMan

Presumably bass drums would sound weak as fuck...which is prob why only jazz guys used double bass back in the stone age.

Jez6345789

Saw a lot of bands on the college and local halls circuit back in the early 70's and it was exactly that for rock bands a few cranked Marshalls and vocals only to the PA. Bigger names may have had 3 stage monitors for fold back and for the band to here each other roughly but in general, it was just a single foldback for the vocalist. 

I think the first fully miked band I saw was Cozy Powells Hammer in 1974 and all I can really remember it was ear damagingly loud and I was deaf and had ringing in my ears for the following week it was a huge PA for an art college gig. . I just remember thinking so many mikes on the drums. When they hit the first song the audience literal all stepped back from the stage it was that loud. 

As for amazing live stuff, I think a lot of that era was heavily overdubbed in the studio with solo's dropped in and drums often replayed to tighten stuff up. 

The other factor was many of those band clocked up 100's of gigs so certainly could play. And I saw loads of band two or 3 times and you have to say a year was a long time and bands definitely got way tighter and together with the levels of regular gigging back then. 

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

I recall some documentary or other with the Rolling Stones, saying that in their 60s heyday the sound of the girls screaming was so loud nobody could hear anything anyway, so they'd just play Mary Had a Little Lamb or whatever else nonsense song came to mind to pass the time before they could get off stage. None of the audience was any the wiser regardless of whatever shit they attempted to churn out on the stage.

Must have been kinda soul destroying when they're trying to be great musicians! Although they were probably all off their faces anyway so likely didn't care too much! 

ArchtopDave

Back in the '60's, there wasn't much in the way of PA available, so you accepted whatever you heard as being what was on offer. Sometimes the vocals were dreadful, but, on the other hand, you were able to see well known bands in relatively small venues. I saw Rory Gallagher on tour in a Cambridge pub. Pink Floyd used to do their gigs in one of the Cambridge cinemas, which had a reasonable stage in front of the screen. Plus gigs were usually not packed out like today, so it was easy to choose where you wanted to be. Some gigs were stupidly loud, but not too many... being the era when the Marshall Stack had been invented.

Similarly, there was only one major outdoor festival - The Reading Festival. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go, as he had a spare seat in his car. We just turned up on the day, and paid at the entrance. Then chose our own patch on the grass in front of the stage. The weather was fortunately good in 1967, and quite a lineup on stage.

Grumpyrocker

Additional question related to this - in older footage of this era you often see vocalists holding several mics taped together, what was that about? 

Sometimes there would be mics that looked like they were double ended (oor er mrs). Was that for noise/feedback cancellation?

pintspiller

I assumed the two-mic thing was that one was for the film-maker

boogieman

Yeah the two mics were for the film recording and the PA. 

I saw Free in their heyday at the Albert Hall. Koss and Andy Fraser had four Marshall stacks.... each! Either Simon Kirk was the heaviest hitting drummer ever or his kit was miked up. I do have vague recollections of overhead mic’s hanging above the kit in that era.  Coming home from gigs with ears ringing was a regular thing and probably why I have tinnitus these days. 

blobb

SoS did a really nice article about this in memory of Charlie Watkins WEM

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/charlie-watkins

LuttiS

There's a Beatles documentary (think its on prime) about the touring years, it's really quite good. I seem to remember that they had giant amps specially made, which still didn't really help get over the screaming, in the USA they used a baseball fields tannoy system to sing over, which must have been just awful

ESBlonde

Before the technology of small diaphragm drivers and horns with quality crossovers existed, the typical vocal type PA was a 100w valve mixer amp and a pair of 4x12" columns. If you were lucky the 12" driver had a smaller parasitic cone to give better treble response.

If you were on a big tour you might have several of these amplifiers slaved together to get more umph! (Sorry to get all technical at the end there).

Because loudspeaker technology was in it's infancy the idea of high power drivers was almost unheard of. The Gauss drivers of choice would be rated at 75w and the JBL 12" driver at 100w.

So there was no immediate need to develop huge power amps because nothing could handle the power anyway. The ubiquitous Amcron but out about 125w a side at 8 Ohm iirc, the phase linear a little more but was known as the flame linear because of it's propensity to burst into flame.

So these very inefficient loudspeakers were put into ever more complex horn loaded cabinets to optimise efficiency and throw. People understood so little of the effects of stacking speakers, in fact the original 4x12 vertical columns were true line array in the context that we now understand. Laying then on thier side and stacking them was completely the wrong thing to do.

Altec Lansing, Gauss, JBL, Crown/Amcron, Shure etc. led the way in the USA and Celestion and Watkins (WEM) followed in the UK.

Many individual Firms built there own Cabs and systems using thier own ideas, some of these became household names from thier earlier success whils many got bypassed by the big industrial backed companies that we mainly know now.

So suffice to say the sound was VERY subjective and varied compared to where in the room you were. Everthing was louder than everything else! Monitors were very crued, under powered and using expensive but simple graphics for control. Many early sound engineers took a standard sm57 and removed the internal balance transformer (which had a habit of overloading and distorting) so the mic went in a kick drum and connected direct to the desk, this Mic usually stayed in the engineers personal bag and was painted or marked with coloured tape.

Were early concerts enjoyable? Many were, the excitement of the performance still came over, and other than the bands that just had to be the loudest, most cared enough about the sound to work with thier engineers.

The reason the Beatles stopped touring was because the sound systems couldn't get above the crown noise and they often just mimed to save thier voices.

Finally, John Entwistle would never trust his sound to any of those early PA systems, his stage rig just got bigger and bigger. Pete Townsend attributes his tinitus to this because he had to compete to hear himself. Pink Floyd developed thier own PA system to have some control (and the first quadraphonic system) that became Brittania Row Sound. Brittania Row Productions are now owned by Clair Bros of the USA

steven70

Fantastic, some great stuff - thanks folks for all of this, really cool.
Getting some insight into how far things have come on with technology - and a feel for the amount of work that went into gigging...which I guess is the bottom line when it comes to a 'classic' performance. Superb. 

Edit: PS Whatever other problems, I would love to have had the chance to play a show with a Bluesbreaker 2 x12 combo cranked up. Doesn't seem possible. Can only imagine what it would be like standing in front of a 100watt stack..too much. Thanks again for some fascinating insights.

redrighthand

I watched the Beatles tour movie and was wondering how they captured what appears to be a decent recording of those gigs with no visible mics on any of the instruments onstage?

Danny1969

redrighthand said:

I watched the Beatles tour movie and was wondering how they captured what appears to be a decent recording of those gigs with no visible mics on any of the instruments onstage?

Well one trick was splitting the vocal mics and blending that in with a mono mic capturing the drums, guitar and bass plus audience. That's why most  of the recordings are so vocal heavy .....  luckily the mics had wider patterns back then so a lot of guitar and audience got into the vocal mics and made it on the recording. In the early sixties there was only really 2 track recorders in the field and 4 track recorders in the studio so no option for decent multitrack recordings 

@steven70 ; I did a college gig in the eighties using a 100 watt Marshall Jubilee into a 4 X 12" cab turned up full for the whole gig.  It was mentally loud but you kinda get used to it  

As primitive as it was at least music back then was almost all live .... The Who used a lot of pre recorded backing but nothing like bands use now. These days most big shows are done to a click because it solves a lot of technical problems like time syncing lights, movie clips  and samples but also because it offers redundancy in any performance issues. Shania Twain audiences were actually listening to the vocals from the week before at a totally different gig at 2 or 3 venues on one tour  because Shania had voice problems .... as the whole show is done to a click every performance is the same so using a vocal, guitar or keyboard track from another performance isn't an issue. In my own band we use this trick for rehearsals ... if the bass player or keyboard player can't make rehearsal it doesn't matter, just use the bass or keyboard tracks from another show .. it's all done to the same click tempos and always starts and stops in the place so it doesn't need to be played by a live person more than once. Never done it for a show but it would be no problem to do so.
Back in the day when everyone used wedges that would have been a problem ... you can't have clicks and prompts coming through something the audience can hear .... these days with all the band on ears it's not a problem. 

Personally I like to hear bands in smallish venues of up to 1000 or so these days where everything still sounds great but it sounds live. Watching something like the Stones it's so distant audio-ably as well visually  .... there's no way of telling what your hearing is what your see'ing. 

ICBM

redrighthand said:

I watched the Beatles tour movie and was wondering how they captured what appears to be a decent recording of those gigs with no visible mics on any of the instruments onstage?

Probably by the magic of overdubbing them in the studio afterwards .

koneguitarist

I used to use wem column speakers, never knew what a monitor was used for. 

My band was one of the first in my area to use bass bins and tops and actually separate amps and crossovers. 
Went right back to the old days with small vocal PA and very small monitors for singer and drummer. Just running off of backline. sounded great. if you had discipline.

ICBM

koneguitarist said:

Went right back to the old days with small vocal PA and very small monitors for singer and drummer. Just running off of backline. sounded great. if you had discipline.

I still think there's something to be said for it in a small venue when you're playing below the level where the kit needs to be mic'ed - it gives a really nice natural mix in a way you just don't get with all the instruments through the PA, but you do need to know what you're doing and be prepared to listen to guidance from offstage to get the balance right. Positioning the amps and using EQ to mix rather than just volume is really important too.

Once you get beyond that volume it gets difficult to get a good even mix in the room with just backline. I'm not old enough to have been to big gigs pre-PA-system, but I've certainly heard enough bands being too loud in a small space like that...