http://earfarm.com/features/daily-feature/wednesday/2698 Click to read in it's entirety... now!
Actually it’s not that curious at all. Yes, bad sound plagued an alarming number of SXSW shows this past week, but how could anyone truly expect any other outcome given the way the whole colossal enterprise unfolds?
I would imagine sound guys hate South By Southwest. It probably approximates their vision of hell. In this fiery inferno, soundchecks don’t exist. New bands appear every 30 minutes and require an entirely new setup and mix. A frenzied 20 minutes is then spent achieving an acceptable mix, only to be dissembled moments later to make way for the next act – and oh wait, this next band has a horn section and only wants 50% trombone in their monitors?! An elusive perfect mix rarely occurs and goes unnoticed by the crowd, whereas a bad mix draws rubbernecking stares. Self-entitled bands accustomed to cushier environs complain and unleash their frustrations….on you, the sound guy. Welcome to hell.
Of course, it’s a two-way street, and bands certainly don’t have it any easier. Think about it. For four straight days, at any given public space from about noon to 2 am, a seemingly endless queue of bands stream in and out and perform half-hour sets….except these slots aren’t really a half hour; thirty minutes is just the time advertised in order to cram as many acts on a single bill as possible. So this means that in a single hour, at least two bands are expected to load all of their gear onto a stage, make sure everything is tuned, operational, and ready to go (often times with rented or borrowed gear with which they’re largely unfamiliar), frantically play until the club’s manager, sound guy, or event organizer mouths the dreaded “you got one more song guys” (or just pulls the plug mid-song, more on that later), and then rush everything off the stage to make way for the next band. Stressful! Also, this atmosphere doesn’t really lend itself to fostering the most natural and assured performance.
And still, the sound guy endures and absorbs the crowd’s confused stares and the band’s complaints. The band trudges on and makes do with shoddy vocal mixes, broken monitors, and the seemingly deaf ear of the sound guy. The circle of life at SXSW continues as it should, and this is a good thing. As I said before, how could anyone expect it any other way? We need to embrace the aura of bad sound, dropped signals, and feedbacking mics for the unexpected insight these nagging bits of misfortune provide about the bands we’ve assembled to see.
Please click the link and continue reading....It gets even more interesting. Read about Mikachu and Graham Coxon, and Late to the Pier's problems last week!
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