rremando

Hey hope I'm in the right forum for this.

We're having some issues with our jam sessions. We started with two guitarist, slowly added vocalist and within a short time we've acquired a bassist and a percussionist. Which is causing issues because the sound is way off and none of us have dealt with this before. We basically are noise, barely hear the vocals and I think but I may be wrong, I think the pa is picking up to much hot frequencies. I'll give you a list of the gear we're using and tell you about the jam room.

The jam room is approx 23ft x 10ft. We built in a bass trap in one corner at the opposite side of the room. for sound proofing purposes, which helps a lot. We've hung carpet on two ends of the room, the 10ft wide walls.

The lead guitar just shrieks! I play rhythm and the leads just kill my ears. one problem might be EQ each guitar amp to work together better. I don't know. Then the drums come in, ****.

1 solid state amp -Rhythm guitar 1
1 tube amp -Lead guitar 2
1 bass amp -bass
acoustic drums -louddd drummer
powered speaker 550 watt and mixing board -only used for single mic at this time. Not mic'ing the instruments at all.

Like I said the drummer is loud, which is good and bad. Bad for the small room.

Our position in the room is like a stage setup (as much as can possibly be) cept the powered speaker. faces us and bass amp pointed sideways. We are playing (amps) towards the longer length of the room. Is this wrong should we be set up wide rather than facing the length of the room?

I've tried pulling the 5 band eq on the mixing board. Which helped allow higher gain and volume on the speaker. I know more power would help but I'm more worried about getting everything else to work together, the instruments. No more shrieking moise! Yes I've considered ear plugs but there seems to be the same problem in getting all the instruments configured to work better together.

Any advice is great advice. I appreciate the read

GuitarBizarre

Welcome to a brief, no bull**** guide to practice.

I'll start with one basic rule of practice - TURN YOUR **** DOWN. That includes your "loud drummer".

I don't care how good you think your loud drummer is, if he can't tame it, his technique isn't good enough. Period. Not only does it mean you'll always find practice spaces hard to live with, but it also affects the quality of your set - If your drummer starts and finishes a set on 11, that means the audience got tired of hearing him 3 songs in. He should start on 5 and end on 10, reserving 11 for the big finish and set highpoints.

Secondly, get your entire band to wear some damn earplugs. I don't care how uncool you think they are, they're cheap as ****, and not only do they prevent you from turning your ears into potato by the time you're 35, they REALLY. REALLY. HELP. THE SOUND.

Seriously. Wear ****ing earplugs. Don't "consider" them. Take it from someone who suffers from tinnitus - Do not **** around with protecting your hearing. Do it now. If you don't, you'll regret it. And not only will you regret it, you'll know you could have solved the problem for less than a pack of cigs. And everyone will know you were too foolish and stupid to prevent it when you could have. WEAR GODDAMN EARPLUGS.

Thirdly, when you record, you mix each instrument for its own space in the frequency range.

WEAR EARPLUGS.

MOST BEDROOM GUITARISTS AND INEXPERIENCED GUITARISTS DO NOT KNOW HOW TO EQ THEIR SOUND WHEN THEY PLAY WITH OTHERS.

When you're in your bedroom alone jamming out Metallica riffs, you've probably at least tried the trick of putting your bass and treble up a lot and then scooping out the midrange. That's cool, scooped tones are the basis of most modern metal sounds.

But the guitar's "voice" lives in the midrange. If nothing else is competing with you, a sound based entirely on treble and bass is very big sounding and clear.

WEAR EARPLUGS

But when you're sat with a band, with a bassist covering the low end and the cymbals/snare of the kit covering the high end and presence band, all that happens is you compete with everything else around you and everything ends up overblown.

Turn your guitarists bass and treble controls down by 2 and their mids up by 1. Then turn your gain down by 1. I don't care what they were on before. You'll instantly hear that you're no longer stepping on the bassist or the drummer.

You'll also hear that all that gain was probably muddying up the sound a lot and you'll feel like it's harder to play and sound good. Tough. As a professional or gigging musician, you should be able to play everything you'd normally play with distortion, on a clean sound and hear every damn note fall right into place. If you turn down your distortion and suddenly sound like you can't play - you couldn't play in the first place, the mud of your distortion was just hiding it.

WEAR EARPLUGS DAMMIT

Right, so we've turned you down, gotten you some earplugs, put some midrange back in your guitars, and stopped you competing with your bassist and cymbals. What else do we do?

Well one thing you can do is isolate your amplification from the floor. Get some concrete flagstones and cover them in carpet. They're heavy as **** and will stop vibrations from other things being transferred into the floor of your practice space - which will reduce the mud in your sound. Put all your amps on top of a concrete flagstone covered in carpet. The PA probably has its own stands already so don't worry about that much.

Another thing you can do is EQ your amps differently to each other so that they aren't treading on each other. Have both guitarists sit there chugging an E powerchord while you **** with the EQ. You really don't need to do a lot here - 1 or 2 notches is more than enough to make the difference. For a rock or metal band, just adjust the lead guitarist's sound to favour the midrange a little more, and the rythm guitarist's sound should be a little more scooped, generally. Again, not much - you want the two sounds to mix together, you just don't want them completely the same.

Right, so where do we go from here?

Well you said you carpeted the end walls. What about the floor? Hard floors cause a lot more reverberation than walls do. Low ceilings also don't help so if that's the case you want the entire room lined with SOMETHING that isn't hard. A thin carpet will do almost **** all regardless, so if you can get some foam behind it, even an inch or so, that'll do a lot to help. Obviously that's not practical on a floor, but thick carpet is, so go to it. You're not concerned about looks in a practice space, so go scouting around carpet places for "useless" offcuts. If you can scrounge a square foot here and there you'll not pay much and you'll eventually be able to patchwork some useful sound diffusing material out of it (You're diffusing, not absorbing - the inch of foam is doing the absorbing, the carpet is just spreading it around instead of letting it beam out.)

One thing you might not be aware of is how standing waves work.

Quick physics lesson. When a sound wave starts, it moves at the speed of sound, and vibrates at a given frequency.

If it hits a wall in less than the time it takes to get through one cycle of the frequency, it bounces back on itself and causes a standing wave - useless vibration that muds up the sound and makes the room shake. If you've ever been "hit in the chest" by bass in a club or at a gig, that's a standing wave. It's not "lots of bass" or "volume", it's just that the room is too small to handle the frequency the amp is producing.

You can calculate this pretty easily: Speed of sound in meters per second divided by frequency = the number of meters a sound of that pitch must travel before hitting a wall. For reference, 20Hz tones need to travel ~17 meters unimpeded for this to happen. Lowest note on a 4 string bass is 40Hz, so if you can get about 8.5 meters in front of your bass amp, you should be OK for standing waves. If you can't do that, that's fine, but its a compromise you're going to have to live with that your low end WILL woof out a bit on those low E chuggs.

For guitars, you're talking 80Hz as the lowest note - But there's a strange phenomenon in powerchords that means if you play an E5 chord with the root in the second octave, you'll actually get a weaker, ghost tone, in the first octave. So for all intents and purposes, treat your guitar's bass content as a weaker version of the actual bass. (This is also why full bass/treble scooped mids guitar setups step on basses so much - they're literally producing the same frequencies if powerchords are being played. Sound is weird.)









There's tons more you can WEAR EARPLUGS do, but I'll leave you with this much for now. Any questions hit me up and I'll try to answer.

Also, tell me everything about your practice space and try to nutshell your bands musical style - different **** needs different tweaks to work the best it can.

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Quality Cucumber

^ Great advice. I will second turning down the volume and gain, and wearing earplugs. If you turn down, your drummer will have to bring it down too in order to hear anything. Really ride everybody's ass and make them stay at a manageable volume. As for earplugs, these are the best cheap option: Etymotic Research | ETY

If you get the foam earplugs, all they're going to do is block out treble and midrange and make everything muffled. The Etymotics attenuate overall volume, so everything still sounds relatively clear. I suggest you buy them for your entire band so that they don't have a reason to not wear them (and so you can get the bulk discount). This is what I do when I join a band that doesn't believe in earplugs. Initially, some are skeptical or even insulted, but I've seen people turn around completely and even thank me after they realize that I saved their cochlea.

Point your drummer toward brushes (probably not cool enough for metal, if that's what you're doing) or these: Low volume drum sticks - Ultra Tones from Lidwish Soulutions for quiet accurate drumming

Quiet playing ultimately comes from technique though, so tell your drummer to get better.

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GuitarBizarre

I wouldn't go that far. Nice earplugs are a lot better than foam ones, but foam ones will still do the job pretty well. Its just not wearing earplugs at all that is an idiot's game.

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