Amp Placement Followup

Oh brother, youre over analyzing things. During practice have everyone point there amps BACK at the drummer, tilted up so they can hear them better, and stand in front of them so you dont go deaf. Good grief.

For playing shows, if you do more than just play bars, buy a 4 x 12 tower, set it on its side, angled up with a couple of golf balls (really) and stand in front of it so its blowing past your ankles, so, 1) the band can hear itself, and 2) you dont have to, so you can hear yourself sing.

In other words, have the people who need to hear themselves, be inline with there amps, pointed at the drummer, and you stand out in front of them, so theyre not squeezing blood out your ears.

And btw, if the amps are on the floor, the transmission of low frequency signals, while they can be transfered through the floor to peoples feet, accomplishes nothing. The floor simply eats up and diminishes low frequency signals. All signal actually. You could elevate your amps by 6 wires suspended from solid stainless-steel chromed and polished beams, each seperate string tuned to E, A, D, G, B, and E, which will produce a flanging, chorus like, sitar effect which will drive rats from homes within a 6 mile radius making you the hero's of the neighborhood. Allowing you to do any scared, single, fiftyish, frumpy woman, you can find. Good luck and G-d Bless.

Or you can buy the proper ear plugs and let your friends play at the volume they like. I believe someone here once posted a link to good ear plugs. Google is good.

You put earplugs in your eustachian tubes? How do you get them up into your nasopharynx?

I think you mean 'external auditory canals' or 'earholes'.

It depends on the gig.

In a small practice room or club, I prefer to have my small combo elevated on an amp stand close to my ears. Why? Because with a couple of the bands I play with they prefer to run everything through the PA, and if I have the amp at my feet at a volume I can play with, it's 'too loud' for everyone else.

Larger gigs, or say a 'power-trio' setup, I put my combo on top of another cabinet sitting on the floor.

Hey, I enjoy a healthy FRIENDLY debate, but I hate arguments. Consider this my 'devil's advocate' stance. Discuss.

1. Vox amps have stands. That means they were made to be elevated. The Fenders with tilt-legs (designed to be angled) are still in contact with the floor. Do you think much 'richness of tone' is being transmitted through 4 small rubber feet? I posit that the steel tilt-legs transmit more tonal resonance, but I think any alleged improvement provided by floor contact (feet, tilt-legs or whatever) is either anecdotal or subjective.

2. An amp pointed at your head will have its volume and tone turned-down, therefore reducing overall stage volume and harshness, and providing for a better mix at Front-Of-House. That's where the people who will pay to see you again are forming their opinions.

3. Can't you just take a single step farther away from a raised amp?

4. What you've described is then problematic if the floor is also in contact with a drum kit, bass amp, and another guitar. Now you have competing vibrations in a solid medium. This produces an awful low-end muck on hollow stages, BTW. Also, any engineeer worth his salt will probably cut excessive lows from guitar amps. Bass is for kick drums and bassists. Guitar is a midrange instrument.

5. Better still is to have the amps facing away from the audience, so they hear what's been mixed through the PA system. Many major touring companies place the amps under the stage, facing up at the players. Less stage clutter, less stage volume hitting the singers microphones. Depends on the act. Now for your average bar band- On a knee-high stage a guitar amp sitting on the stage floor is aimed squarely at the heads of anyone sitting down in a straight line in front of it. At 20 feet away, this is a harsh unpleasant sound, even for other guitarists. On the other hand, if people are standing up, now your sound is being absorbed by the writhing bodies of the eager fans dancing frenetically in the front row (dream with me). Raise the amp a few feet and it will now project into the room (if that's the goal).

6. Agreed. Ideally each player should then have an amp on each side of the drummer. Cooler still is when the guitar has a nice stereo delay bouncing echoes about. Yummy. I do this in coffeehouse type (quiet) gigs with 2 small amps.

7. Holy moly, go buy or borrow a powered monitor for the keyboard player to hear himself! You'll solve several problems at once!

Cheerfully offered for friendly discussion,

-dave

I definitely have the wrong ones. I've been trying to find out if the fitted kind give the same discomfort at the kind I have (-20 db, one size fits all). If you say I can wear those plugs and still sing without my voice rocketing through my ears, I'll go down tomorrow. They only cost 110 euros here and I'm making a good living these days.

I don't think I want to go to -20 though, I'm thinking -5 or at most - 10...we don't play that loud after all.

Yep, that's why I threw out these 'rules' (that and the vitamin B12 I'm taking has me speeding along)

That's two out of a hundred...

Okay, here's the problem. The lead guitarist can't get his 'tone' (Les Paul through a Hot Rod Deluxe, sounds like mud to me, but he's pleased with it) without turning things up...so how do you guys do it?

My solution right now is my latest purchase: a Sansamp Tri AC...that way I expect to be able to shape the sound(s) I want with that, which will let me keep the sound down at the amp.

Wish I could...

Okay, I admit, my main concern is to keep the sound down and far from my ears right now. I am going to get fitted for earplugs tomorrow, promise, but I won't have them for a couple of weeks.

This guy is one stubborn puppy. Just refuses. He's got plenty of coin too.

It's not a big deal...I'm getting ready to move on to a new band...

Ouch...the ringing in my ears is usually quite tolerable, and was barely noticeable to me until last year, when I had that incident with the ear plugs.

Right now I'm trying out large doses of vitamin B12...it's only been a day so far, and already the ringing is substantially diminished. It's still there, but it seems pushed back farther in the background, like it's just less present. We'll see how things go after a couple of weeks. I'm not expecting a cure though, since I've probably had this for a long while (early 80s punk band days).

Luckily for me, my hearing is normal...

Unfortunately you (and many others besides you) don't. Actually, ANY too loud noise, that is in the human hearing range, will destroy them as much as well. There is no frequency dependancy - besides our hearing range - we just find the high frequencies more irritating. This is also a very good reason why people make them self deaf more easily with amps that are clean on high sound pressures than with amps that distort. Human ear perceives undistorted tone quieter and smoother even though it's already loud enough to do some serious hearing damage. There's also more problems: When the frequency of a too loud noise goes below or above our hearing range we cannot hear it but it still might do some damage, this time to our internal organs. It might affect to our muscles, stop pacers from working etc. Lot's of whales have died due to subsonic signals that radar systems of submarines send. In water their amplitude can exceed 200db!

Teemu K

Dont know. I dont even know how to spell it properly; theres got to be a name for it...

Jody explained it to me this way; lower frequencies of the same volume, dont vibrate the little cillia like hairs back and forth as quickly, which is why it causes less damage. But thats just what she told me.

It's actually better to spread the amps out a little bit. Unified sound? Bullshit. Now you can't hear your guitar because it's being tromped on by the bass amp next to it and the guitar amp next to that. If you spread them out a little, you can hear your amp over here, and he can hear his over there.

All my gigs in the last 18 years or so have had miked amps. The smart way to do it then is the 'crossfire' setup. Let the PA drive the room...the amps are strictly for onstage sound.

I set my Legend cabs on top of each other, but they're not 4x12s. I use 2x12 cabs that are sized like 4x10s. This way, even when they're stacked, my head's not getting creamed. The sound is right at *guitar* level...perfect for feedback-type effects etc.

I can hear my rig fine, and all I have to do to hear the other guitarist is to step back out of the blast, for lack of a better word and that's where his is pointed. The vocalist is further forward, and is missing the amps almost entirely, since they're 'crossfiring' behind him.

~Rich See my gear at the link!