Reply by John
I can’t resist. 1976. Kendall Art School Of Design Halloween party. A band of weekenders called Dead Eddy Codiene and the Time Release Capsules. I had just purchased my first PA from an ad in the paper. A pair of Peavey SP-1s, a pre-DDT Peavey CS-800, and a monstrosity of a Peavey 12-channel “stereo” mixer with these big honking VU meters on it. Hot Damn! Very memorable gig.
The art students took their costumes so seriously that the place looked like a Hollywood extras back lot, the beautiful and busty lead singer had a lot of difficulty keeping herself stuffed into the lounge dress she had picked out, and the sax player (who later Sid Barrett-ed out) tried to turn the gig into an all night jam of “Tarantula.” As I recall it sounded pretty good in a raw simple way. I think I have it all on a reel somewhere. Maybe I should dig it out and see.
Nah!
Reply by Joel
My first professional (i.e. paying) gig, was at a local bar, and I had built my first sound system. I was just going to take a year off from playing drums for a living, and the band was one I had auditioned for, but didn’t take that gig.
They called me, and I just thought it sounded like an easy way to make money, and I could stop working at the local department store.
I charged them $125/night, and after Friday night’s gig, with the most horrible distortion and feedback coming out of the mains/monitors (too much gain on all vocal inputs), they said, “If this isn’t right tomorrow, we will have no choice but to not pay you. We cannot afford to not be hired back here.”
Needless to say, I worked on the system all day Saturday, getting the CD player to sound good, so then I started working with the gains and learning structure and gain staging right then.
Saturday night was pretty good, and I got hired for more shows, and I felt good.
Reply by Don
Well, I’m a relative newbie compared to some of the veterans who post here, but here goes:
My first gig was helping a friend (my current employer) set up and mix his daughter’s band along with two other local underground acts. This was about 4 years ago. He had an Alesis (I think) 16-channel mixer, an ART reverb unit that I think was designed for guitar use, a 100-foot 16-channel snake, a Carvin 1500-watt amp for front of house and my Mackie 1400i for monitors (both still in use today)
For house speakers, we were running a mismatched pair of 15-in 3-way cabs on each side (passive x-over, of course, and a pair of Fender 12-in plus blown piezo horn for monitors. We ran vocals only, so we only used a maximum of five channels all night (three mics and two channels for CD player) We ran the reverb right inline with the main output and bypassed it for the CD player between sets.
These bands were LOUD!!! If a guitar player didn’t have a 4 x 12 half stack, they couldn’t hear themselves well enough over the drummer (whose snare invariably sounded like a high powered rifle) Bass amps were of the same caliber, and always WAY too loud. We did quite a few of these shows for free, because it was Dave’s daughter’s band (along with various others) and we were still learning.
Our mission became “make the vocals able to be heard over the guitars” and if we only blew one 15-in woofer a night we were happy. These bands thought we were the greatest thing to come along since frozen pizza because none of their other shows ever had more than a 200-watt powered mixer and 12-in plus horn cabs, and no monitors. We eventually achieved our goal of making the vocals audible, but by that point it was so loud (lots of guitar and drums bleeding through vocal mikes too) that nobody could stand it. We learned a lot during those shows (also a lot about what not to do. )
We have of course progressed a lot over the past four years, and we now do two-three shows a week with much better bands and much better equipment for much better pay.
