How LOUD were the classic rock bands??

SpareRib said:
Thanks, Jim. I do tune high because of this issue. I want the body of a larger diameter drum tuned higher. I think that's what I'm really after. I already use an uncut reso I will just take out my foam muffling.

Really, I just don't like the smaller drum sizes and the 18" deep bass drums drive me nuts (sound and space wise). I like 14" and 16" max.
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Very good.

You make a great point here. A larger diameter bass drum will give you a lower tone. And if you are careful about the depth and keep it shallow like 14" you won't be trying to move so much air.
And tuned higher it should cut through the band mix just fine.


Play on my friend..................

.
 
deltdrum said:
I've been playing with a 24" Giant Beat on my set for the better part of a year now. I've had to make adjustments because simply put, the thing is like holding a wolf by the ears. If I get too aggressive on the thing, I completely wash out my band.
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Are you sure it's not just from your POV? I play a 24" Giant Beat (on a Bonham maple kit) in my soul band and it certainly doesn't drown out the band. I do mostly keep it for when we're tearing it up at the end of tunes tho. I open up my 15" 2002s for a bit of slosh elsewhere :D
 
That's what I'm hoping for. They're just harder to come by and you have to pay more for used in those sizes or to custom order them.

One day...
 
Liebe zeit said:
Are you sure it's not just from your POV? I play a 24" Giant Beat (on a Bonham maple kit) in my soul band and it certainly doesn't drown out the band. I do mostly keep it for when we're tearing it up at the end of tunes tho. I open up my 15" 2002s for a bit of slosh elsewhere :D
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Oh, how I envy thee!
 
PHP:
SpareRib said:
I do tune high because of this issue. I want the body of a larger diameter drum tuned higher. I think that's what I'm really after...
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You and me both. Not so much for the extra volume, but for the tighter articulation from less pitch-bending that looser heads on smaller drums are known for. And tonally, they end up in close to the same spot.
 
Mid 70s. Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. A friend had scored front row seats nice and close the RHS PS speakers. Someone brought a type of ear plug wax.

The concerts going on and I'm wondering how it would sound if I took out one ear plug. I took out the left one that wasn't facing he PA Hey, sounds good.

When I went to bed my left ear was howling like no tomorrow. Pretty loud.

Not sure if the Cure about 10 years ago were louder. We were 2/3rds of the way back in the stadium and my ears were killing me. We all ended up making impromptu ear plugs with damepened tissue paper. That s 2/3rds of the way back! Waaay too loud IMO

I don't like music at high volume any more - it's an ordeal for me. Can't handle doof doof clubs for the same reason (plus boring music and no live musos).
 
eclipseownzu said:
I experienced a rather strange phenomenon at a show recently. It was a collection of stoner rock/doom bands at a club in Boston. These bands were deafening, which is pretty much how I prefer my music, so I was cool with it. Standing at the front of the stage, maybe 6 feet from the kit, the snare was almost inaudible. But when you walked back by the sound booth the mix came in an everything sounded pretty good. At first I though it was just the drummer hitting lightly, but it was the same with every band. Pretty strange, I am a front of the stage kind of guy and I have never experienced that before.
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I've never experienced that either. The snare is usually cutting cutting through.

I love stoner/doom rock and sludge. I've heard high on fire are absurdly loud, as well as Electric Wizard.

And of course the headliner always gets more volume and a better mix
 
When rock bands started playing in arenas and various halls, PA's were non-existent. You were lucky if someone scraped together two or three Altec A7 Voice of the Theater speakers on each side of the stage with a couple hundred watts driving them. Watkins built column speakers that folks like the Who and Zeppelin used. Then Heil started building horn cabinets with JBL drivers and others like Cerwin Vega got into the act. A huge amp was still only a couple hundred watts. And doing something like the Dead and hauling around a pile of Macintosh tube amps was more than most folks wanted to do. So most of the noise came from on stage. 2-4 hundred watt guitar amps and several large bass amps like Ampeg SVT's at 300W, Sunn 2000S at around 120W or the Acoustic 360 which I think was around 200 but had the Cerwin Vega folded horn that threw the sound much better in a large venue. You might get 125-130 in front of the stage with these, losing it as you went back in the room. The PA's were just trying to keep up so you could hear the singing. Compared to anything else, it definitely felt loud at the time. As they piled up more cabinets and amps, they started running everything through the PA and it got a bit louder. But that also allowed for reducing the stage volume. In the pile-o-cabinets days, maybe 1 or 2 amps were actually in use, the rest were to maintain that rock and roll look that people had come to expect.

These days you have dual 21" subwoofers that can handle 6000W and amps that put that out. It is possible (and happens at times) that today is much louder that anything that any of the classic rock bands could manage, even with the scary looking piles of stuff. The technology just wasn't there. A speaker that could handle 100W was a big deal. The speakers that were in those Marshall stacks could only handle 25W apiece. Which is why they had multiple cabinets of 4 of them.
 
What I find strange is the rating of amplifiers now. Back in the day in our 2 guitars, bass and drums band, all the guitars had 100 watt valve amps, with a 100 watt PA for the vocals with 2 column speakers. Most bands used this system and had no problems hearing the vocals out front.

Now I see powered PA cabs on stands rated at 1000 watts running flat out and they struggle to cope. Our bass player has an 800 watt solid state amp for his rig, it has plenty of volume but lacks "Body" somehow.

It would seem to me that a valve watt is not the same as a solid state watt.
 
mikel said:
It would seem to me that a valve watt is not the same as a solid state watt.
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This is definitely true. A 30 watt tube (valve) amp can easily be as loud as a 100 watt solid state amp. I don't know the details, but have certainly experienced the reality of this phenomenon.
 
eclipseownzu said:
I experienced a rather strange phenomenon at a show recently. It was a collection of stoner rock/doom bands at a club in Boston. These bands were deafening, which is pretty much how I prefer my music, so I was cool with it. Standing at the front of the stage, maybe 6 feet from the kit, the snare was almost inaudible. But when you walked back by the sound booth the mix came in an everything sounded pretty good. At first I though it was just the drummer hitting lightly, but it was the same with every band. Pretty strange, I am a front of the stage kind of guy and I have never experienced that before.
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This happens when you get beyond, (as in behind) the front of house PA) You are hearing stage volume for the most part. Maybe some monitor, but doubtful. If you walk back a bit from the stage, you can hear what the sound man is going for and how he/she wants the band to sound.

I get this all the time at shows. Sometimes stage volume is so high, that the sound person hardly mixes the offenders into the mix at all. **See YOB at Hellfest** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d4fKpnafhM They don't normally sound like that. But from what I know. The on stage volume was high for guitar. So the mix, taken from the board, sounds SUPER bass heavy. Because the guitars hardly needed anything to bring the total volume to where it sounded good to people's ears.


SpareRib said:
I've never experienced that either. The snare is usually cutting cutting through.

I love stoner/doom rock and sludge. I've heard high on fire are absurdly loud, as well as Electric Wizard.

And of course the headliner always gets more volume and a better mix
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Yes. HOF are loud. Those straight 16th note double bass beats started to feel like a jackhammer. I haven't heard EW live yet. I am a big fan of the genre. I do like bands that use dynamics though and not just play at 11 all the time. Check out Mars Red Sky, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uyxZZTodsE or White Orange, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfSMuXH2-uU Both are a bit more psychedelic sounding doom, but really cool.

Loudest show that I have been to was back in 1991. Clash of the Titans tour in Lakeland FL. Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, AIC. Slayer recorded half of their Decade of Aggression there. It just kept getting louder as the night went on. The last band was Megadeth, and by then, the sound was terrible. Hell, it already has the horrible acoustics of a big metal box coliseum. You couldn't even tell what songs they were playing till they were almost done with them. I don't mind loud, but that was ridiculous. But, I suppose, that's metal for ya.
 
Road Bull said:
This happens when you get beyond, (as in behind) the front of house PA) You are hearing stage volume for the most part. Maybe some monitor, but doubtful. If you walk back a bit from the stage, you can hear what the sound man is going for and how he/she wants the band to sound.

I get this all the time at shows. Sometimes stage volume is so high, that the sound person hardly mixes the offenders into the mix at all. **See YOB at Hellfest** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d4fKpnafhM They don't normally sound like that. But from what I know. The on stage volume was high for guitar. So the mix, taken from the board, sounds SUPER bass heavy. Because the guitars hardly needed anything to bring the total volume to where it sounded good to people's ears.




Yes. HOF are loud. Those straight 16th note double bass beats started to feel like a jackhammer. I haven't heard EW live yet. I am a big fan of the genre. I do like bands that use dynamics though and not just play at 11 all the time. Check out Mars Red Sky, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uyxZZTodsE or White Orange, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfSMuXH2-uU Both are a bit more psychedelic sounding doom, but really cool.

Loudest show that I have been to was back in 1991. Clash of the Titans tour in Lakeland FL. Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, AIC. Slayer recorded half of their Decade of Aggression there. It just kept getting louder as the night went on. The last band was Megadeth, and by then, the sound was terrible. Hell, it already has the horrible acoustics of a big metal box coliseum. You couldn't even tell what songs they were playing till they were almost done with them. I don't mind loud, but that was ridiculous. But, I suppose, that's metal for ya.
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I just checked out those bands. I really liked them, especially Mars Red Sky! Thanks. I really like Witch, Red Fang, Black Tusk, Baroness, and The Sword.
 
The loudest concert I've been to was A Perfect Circle and The Mars Volta in 2004 at Long Beach Arena. We had to leave early because it was too loud for my wife. Of course, I wanted to stay, but she couldn't handle it at all.
 
mikel said:
It would seem to me that a valve watt is not the same as a solid state watt.
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A watt is a watt. But how the power of an amplifier is determined is different. It used to be the RMS of the voltage peaks of a 1kHz sine wave into a given impedance. That was because the power supplies of amplifiers effectively limited how much output they could give. Nowadays, amplifiers have power supplies that can follow the audio waveform and supply more power during the peaks of the waveform and recuperate during the valleys. So you have all these different power ratings.

Tube guitar amplifiers are louder because they saturate differently. When a solid state amp hits it's limit, it just flattens off the waveform. No more voltage swing. The distortion comes from the sharp edges where the waveform is lopped off. A tube amp generates all kinds of harmonics on top of the waveform as it saturates. Thus the perception of the sound level is higher. Because all this extra stuff is adding to the sound and cutting through.
 
I believe the Who and Stones were noted for 120+ db spl concerts..

Saw a Ted Nuisance concert at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena back in the day and it was easily over 130 db.

You could not stand inside the arena which sat about 14K because it was just literally too painful.

In an interview ,Ted said they would take the recommended wattage level for a venue and add 50%.
 
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SgtThump said:
I didn't read all of the replies, but yeah. The guitar amps back then were clean, clean, clean until they were cranked up to unGodly levels to get the distortion we all know and love.
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Unless.... they were HI-WATT amps. MilSpec and super clean. I loved them amps.
 
Robin Trower was by far the loudest concert I ever went to. It was too loud and I was a 70s hard rocker at the time. Seemed to be a waste to play that loud.
 
I forgot...Emerson Lake and Palmer at Madison Square Garden.........ear splitting...huge PA.....

Steve B
 
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