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Sound level in live shows
Hi Mona and Lisa
Hope you are both doing great.
When you do live shows on stage, did the loud sound levels ever bother you? Do you take any precautions to protect your ears like keeping the levels below a certain safety threshold, or wear hearing protection etc. I ask because I recall in some of the live concerts I’ve been to, my ears would ring for a couple hours after the show. Up on stage are the amplifier speakers pointing away so it doesn’t sound as loud as it does to the audience in front of the stage?
Thanks
Jung -
4 Replies
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Hi Jung,
It depends on the gig. Normally on bigger stages the sound levels are much more controllable. You have the big PA that points towards the audience, away from the stage and smaller monitor boxes in front of, and pointing at, the individual musicians that feed them their custom mix in a volume they want. You have enough distance from the drummer and the guitar & bass amplifier on stage as to not go deaf 😉
In smaller rooms and Clubs however, (like the Cavern club), sometimes you are only a few feet away from the drumkit and the amps behind you. Then in order to hear anything but crashing cymbals, you need the monitor quite loud too (the speaker pointing at you), so you can sing in tune and hear what you and everyone else is playing.
So as you can imagine the volume levels on stage can get pretty loud and it is totally advised to wear ear protection or you will lose some hearing after a while. (We try to be better about this as time goes on.)
Of course, the best thing to do is wear “In-ear monitors” which block out the stage noise and feed you a custom mix, protect your ears and greatly reduce the volume on stage. Here is a good summary of how they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xD0tpaT1Nw
Personally, I have never grown fond of wearing them, despite all their benefits because I simply don’t like the feeling of being somewhat isolated from the audience sounds and the actual noise around me. But were we to go on another tour, I would definitely give them another chance. If you look closely you can see Mona using them during the last Cavern Club show!
Hope that explains things ✌️
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Hi Lisa!
Thanks so much for that in-depth explanation and your own experience dealing with the loud sound on stage. I never would have known how a bigger stage would be safer for your ears before your explanation here and on stage the need to be able to monitor your own sound though monitor boxes so you can stay in tune and hear what you and the others are playing. Learned a lot there and it’s all very fascinating.
The video you shared is also very interesting, thanks for sharing that! Learned a lot there too. So it was the pioneering Beatles who started use of “wedges”, turned in speaker monitors on stage used to hear their own sound from the noise of the loud screaming fans. Always so creative and innovative! And then later Van Halen further innovating ear protection by getting engineers to create the “Dual Custom In Ears”. It makes sense these kinds of ear protection inventions would be driven by the great bands as part of their craft.
I remember in some of the videos seeing Mona wearing something in her ears, and wondered what it was for, but it’s so hardly noticeable, never took notice after that, that she was wearing anything in her ears. Those “In-ear monitors” sound like quite the innovation to protect the ears, though I can see how if they make you feel somewhat isolated from the audience can make using them a little undesirable. Well I hope when you start doing the live shows again, you can find one that can work well for you as we all want you and Mona to be safe and healthy always! 🙂
It’s funny, at one of the ACDC concerts I went to, they lowered an actual cannon onto the stage and when they fired it off for one of their songs, “For Those About to Rock”, the audience went deaf after that for the rest of the show I think. I thought perhaps it was a ploy, so the band could go lazy for the rest of the show and ease off on good playing as no one could notice the difference. LOL. 🙂
Thanks again, really enjoyed this.
Sending you both much love from Canada! 🙂
Jung
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This is such a personal issue for me! I got Tinnitus after an inappropriate administration of IV antibiotics. My ears have been ringing for 12 years. You get used to it, but I’ll never know the sound of silence.Bono and The Edge both have it and wrote a verse about it in ‘Staring at the Sun’
There’s an insect in your ear……If you scratch it won’t disappear….It’s gonna itch and burn and sting…..Do you want to see what the scratching brings?
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Hi Diana
That’s a beautiful song, thanks for sharing it, and U2 is one of my fave bands. I have their Joshua Tree album permanently engrained in my head (love every song on that album) from when I had a cassette of it in my car playing over and over during one of my big road trip down to California in the 90s. I never knew Bono had Tinnitus.
One of my closest friends developed Tinnitus after an injury from a car accident nearly 30 years ago and has been enduring the condition ever since. He use to tell me of some ear devices that generate a low level noise to offset/cancel the tinnitus that have been helpful for some people.
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