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by Peter Thorn
If you’re playing on a hard stage, putting
a drum rug in front of your amp—or even just setting
it on a small moving blanket—can tighten the sound by
taming brash, early reflections. Photo by Andy Ellis
Sometimes, the stars align and a gig goes
just perfectly. You arrive early at the venue, there’s
time for an extensive soundcheck, the crew is top notch, and
the room sounds just right. Your rig is totally dialed in
and the band is ready to fire on all cylinders. During the
gig, you’ve got the packed, enthusiastic crowd in the
palm of your hand, there are no equipment or musical mishaps,
and you leave the stage feeling awesome.
This month’s column isn’t about
any of that.
The Big Picture
In the grand scheme of things, the most important thing to
remember is that when people come to see you play, they are
on your side. They want to be entertained and they’re
rooting for you. Sounds simple, but it can be easy to forget
when things start going wrong onstage. If the audience expected
perfection, they could just listen to your record. What they
want is a show.
Strings can break, amps can blow up, you might
forget the chords to the bridge. It’s how you spontaneously
deal with adverse, difficult situations onstage that can actually
make a decent show a great show, even more exciting than it
would have been if everything went smoothly.
I recall a White Stripes performance on Conan
O’Brien that’s a perfect example of this. During
a guitar solo, Jack White ran over to Conan’s desk,
laid his guitar flat on it, and proceeded to play a slide
solo. But when he strapped the guitar back on, the cable pulled
out! Realizing he was in a predicament—and making a
split-second decision—White dropped the guitar, ran
over to the vocal mic, and finished the song with just drums
and vocals, giving it a 110 percent effort. And I swear, it
was better that it happened that way. It made for a totally
exciting and unique performance.
Sound and Equipment Issues
Sometimes venues simply just don’t sound good. The subwoofers
might be under the stage, creating lots of bass and rumble
or the stage could have a hard wall right behind it and have
a low ceiling, making the sound loud and chaotic. The PA and
monitors could be terrible. Whatever the scenario, it’s
always important to remember that the audience doesn’t
want to know about any of it. They paid to be there and just
want to have fun. It’s your job to rise above and if
at all possible, find solutions. Let’s talk about a
few tricks.
When playing on a stage that’s especially
loud and live, I ask the local crew if there’s an extra
drum rug. These are normally used to keep drums and hardware
from sliding around, and most clubs will have them available.
I use them in front of my amps and cabinets to help kill some
of the liveliness of a hard stage. They can also help warm
up and tighten the sound a bit by killing brash, early reflections.
If the stage sounds chaotic, try angling your
cabinets up towards you and more directly at your ears by
using some wood blocks under the front edge of the cabs. You’ll
probably want to turn down a bit when doing this, which will
usually help the overall stage mix, thereby improving the
front-of-house mix and lowering the chaos factor.
When it comes to volume, I believe a band
should settle in around the drummer. In a perfect world, you
shouldn’t need monitors at all—except for vocals,
of course—to hear each other. If you are doing a soundcheck
and things sound loud, harsh, woolly, or just all wrong, try
turning off the PA and monitors altogether and starting from
that point. Play together and then slowly fill in the gaps,
getting only what you really need in your wedge. For me, I’m
good to go with just a bit of kick drum and hi-hat, some lead
vocal, and my own vocals. Less is more in a room with bad
sound.
Musical Mishaps
If the music train starts to derail during your show, do not
panic. This is the number one rule. Everyone makes mistakes
every now and then. Warren Haynes says, “mistakes are
opportunities” and this can be true. If the singer forgets
the words to the bridge, it might be time to try out those
new licks you’ve been working on. It’s important
to always have one another’s backs when gigging, and
you never, ever want to bad vibe anyone for making a mistake,
at least not onstage. Save the “what happened there?”
discussion for the van ride home. Remember it’s just
music.
Big Gigs, High Pressure
Zakk Wylde was once asked what he does to prepare for big,
high-pressure gigs like television performances. His advice
was essentially: Don’t do anything different than usual.
Play the song just like the last 80 times you played it in
the bar or theater or your own bedroom mirror. Guess what
happens the second you psych yourself out by thinking, “this
is a big gig, everyone’s watching me, I better not screw
up?” You screw up. If I’m doing TV and I feel
nerves coming on, I’ll try to mentally picture Zakk
giving me this advice. It helps me get my head in the game
and back to what’s important—the music.
Remember
The last trick is one that I learned from Chris Cornell. Sometimes,
when doing TV, you may have to perform an abbreviated version
of a song by cutting the guitar solo or possibly dropping
half of the second verse. This can be hard to remember in
the heat of the moment, especially when you’ve performed
a song many times with a certain arrangement and are suddenly
forced to play it differently. What I do is put a sign by
my pedalboard that simply reads, “REMEMBER.” That’s
it—one word. Just looking down and seeing that will
be enough to jar your memory, and you’ll do exactly
what you need to do.
If Keith Can Do It
I once saw Keith Richards screw up the intro to “Brown
Sugar” in front of a stadium crowd. He made a funny
face, shrugged, kept calm, and carried on. And the crowd loved
it!
Peter Thorn is an L.A.-based guitarist, currently
touring with Melissa Etheridge. His solo album, Guitar Nerd,
is available through iTunes and cdbaby.com. Read more about
his career at peterthorn.com.
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