Today I played a wedding with my function band, The Nameless Three.
For the most part the gig was great, with a very receptive (if not slightly inebriated!) crowd and a lovely venue. Usually at our gigs I split the bulk of the live-sound work with our keyboard player, but for this particular show he was unavailable and so we had a dep playing with us, meaning that sound check and general tech were all handled by myself.
Things mostly went as usual, although we did have some issues later in the evening with the sound limiter in the venue. We advertise ourselves as being ”sound limiter friendly’, and can usually adapt our volume levels pretty well, but in this situation we did end up in a bit of a pickle.
Towards the end of our second set, the audience got particularly rowdy. This is usually great, and in fact is what we are aiming for by this point in the evening, but at this particular venue it had an unexpected side effect.
It turns out that the microphone for the limiter was hidden away from the stage itself, meaning that our moderate volume wasn’t a problem – but the crowd cheering and singing along at the back was actually enough to set off the limiter – even between our songs at one point! Thankfully we are all pretty experienced with working around this kind of thing and managed to keep the audience clapping and singing along even while we waited for the power to come back on, but surely this kind of thing shouldn’t be a problem in a professional setting?!
While I fully understand and respect the need for audio level limiting and monitoring in many situations, surely the industry should by now have come up with a standardised way of fitting sound level meters and calibrating them appropriately to avoid this kind of embarrassing and event-compromising situation?…
