by Serguey Shinder
In March 2019 we played a function room above a pub in a town on the edge of Manchester. Ninety people, a good crowd for a wet Thursday. Halfway through our third song the amplifiers, the keyboard and the vocal microphones all went dead at once. The drums carried on for a bar before our drummer noticed he was the only one left. About twenty seconds later everything came back.
It happened twice more before the end of the set. The landlord, who had watched without much surprise, explained it afterwards. The room had a noise limiter. A small microphone on the ceiling measured the level, and if it stayed above a set figure for more than a few seconds, it cut the power to the sockets by the stage. It was a condition of the pub's licence, agreed with the council after complaints from the houses behind it. There was a box with a row of lights on the wall at the back, going from green to red, which none of us had seen.
I was annoyed for about a week. Then I thought about what we had actually done. We had arrived, set up, and turned everything up to where it sounded like us in rehearsal. Nobody asked the venue whether there was a limit, because in four years nobody had ever told us about one. And the thing that kept tripping it was not the guitars. It was the drums, which are loud in a small room whatever you do, plus everybody else turning up to be heard over them.
The limit was not a fault in the venue. It was the reason the venue was allowed to have bands at all. And a room is a set of conditions before it is a stage: neighbours, a licence, a curfew, a wall somebody has to sleep behind.
We changed how we load in. The first question to any venue, before the stage size or the parking, is whether there is a limiter, what level it is set to, and where the display is. If there is one, somebody stands where they can see the lights during soundcheck while we play our loudest song. Our drummer now owns a set of lighter sticks and a practice kit with mesh heads for small rooms, and the rest of us set our levels from the drums down, not the other way round.
We went back to that pub four times. The lights stayed green, and the crowd heard every song through to the end.
A room's limits are part of the gig. Ask about them before you plug anything in.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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