by Serguey Shinder
We arrived at six for a nine o'clock start. The hall was a good size, wooden floor, high ceiling, and completely empty, and by half past six it sounded magnificent. We spent forty minutes getting it there. The vocal sat exactly where we wanted it, the guitar had air around it, and we went off for something to eat feeling unusually well prepared.
By the second song of the night, with perhaps two hundred people in, I could not hear the vocal at all and the whole thing sounded like it was happening inside a cupboard.
An empty room is a hard, reflective object. A full one is a soft, absorbent one, and the absorption is uneven. Bodies take the high frequencies first, which is precisely where consonants live, so the thing that disappears is not the volume of the voice but the intelligibility of it. All that lovely space we had heard at six thirty was the room's reverberation, and two hundred coats had removed it. On top of that we had set the monitors in silence, and by the third song the audience was louder than our monitors, so all five of us were operating on less information than we had planned around.
What we had done was measure the system in the only conditions available to us and then treat that measurement as a description of the conditions it would run in. I know exactly how that sounds, because I have made the same argument at work about a staging environment with four hundred rows in it and one user, in a tone of voice suggesting that anyone who wanted more was being difficult.
We do three things differently now and none of them are clever. Somebody stands out in the room during the first song with the authority to change things, which is the only real instrument any of us has, and we agreed in advance that this person is not to be argued with from the stage. We keep a note of the desk settings from the last full room in a venue of that shape, and we start from those rather than from what sounds good at six. And we deliberately soundcheck the vocal too bright and too loud, because we know which direction the room will move once it fills.
The wider version of it has stayed with me. The measurement was accurate. Nothing was miscalibrated, nobody was careless, and the conditions simply changed between the moment we measured and the moment it mattered, in a direction that was entirely predictable and that we had never bothered to predict. An empty room will always tell you what you want to hear. It is the only audience that agrees with everything.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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