Andy
Honorary Member
A new venue opened up locally a couple of months back. A craft brewery - industrial building in an industrial park out of town. I suppose it's appeal is it's fairly rough industrial aesthetic. It's a working brewery during the week, but Saturday night, they wheel in a bar & get live music in.
Sound wise, it's a challenging space. Fine for duos or near acoustic acts. Fine too for a bit of thrash, but for an act like ours, it requires some thinking through. In highly reflective spaces, the trick is to keep stage volumes low, & let FOH handle the room. From there, the less SPL you can push into the space, the better. Just keep enough low end to retain a full & satisfying vibe. We mostly achieved this.
They usually have acts setting up at the opposite end of the space, but we chose to set up right in the middle of the beer vessels - even electing to forsake our usual stage banner & illuminate behind the performance area instead. No stage, but I bought my lightweight riser.
It was really cold. We suffered a big drop in temperature over the last few days, & the venue hadn't sorted heating out - that was a mistake. I think the inside temperature was 4C (about 40F). This was difficult to play in, & uncomfortable for the audience. Despite this, we had a good evening, losing perhaps 20% of the audience at half time due to temperature. We still had by far the biggest audience in this venue to date.
Anyhow, here's a picture during setup, & a very short video clip. Sound is 50% camera mic, 50% desk feed https://youtu.be/mOYtEVqlAPs
Please forgive the obvious bass drum reso head fail. I had to change head at the last minute before hailing out, & somehow had a brain fart. Anyhow, the venue is called the Wobbly Brewery, so somehow, the head orientation was appropriate.
Sound wise, it's a challenging space. Fine for duos or near acoustic acts. Fine too for a bit of thrash, but for an act like ours, it requires some thinking through. In highly reflective spaces, the trick is to keep stage volumes low, & let FOH handle the room. From there, the less SPL you can push into the space, the better. Just keep enough low end to retain a full & satisfying vibe. We mostly achieved this.
They usually have acts setting up at the opposite end of the space, but we chose to set up right in the middle of the beer vessels - even electing to forsake our usual stage banner & illuminate behind the performance area instead. No stage, but I bought my lightweight riser.
It was really cold. We suffered a big drop in temperature over the last few days, & the venue hadn't sorted heating out - that was a mistake. I think the inside temperature was 4C (about 40F). This was difficult to play in, & uncomfortable for the audience. Despite this, we had a good evening, losing perhaps 20% of the audience at half time due to temperature. We still had by far the biggest audience in this venue to date.
Anyhow, here's a picture during setup, & a very short video clip. Sound is 50% camera mic, 50% desk feed https://youtu.be/mOYtEVqlAPs
Please forgive the obvious bass drum reso head fail. I had to change head at the last minute before hailing out, & somehow had a brain fart. Anyhow, the venue is called the Wobbly Brewery, so somehow, the head orientation was appropriate.