Croyden, UK
Tuesday, jul 18th, 2006What a difficult concert, we nearly cancelled because of the sound conditions.
The sound equipment was good except for the front speaker system that was from the 80’s, low quality and really insufficient. The organization told us the problem was the British government, they don’t allow to go over a maximum sound pressure and that’s not enough for us, but still after that, I don’t understand why they would have a bad speaker system for the best mixing table in the market. If we could not go loud, at least we should have quality.
Anyway, we were lucky that the audience came to see us and didn’t mind this at all and were vibrating with us since the first second. I must congratulate Marina and my people becuase they didn’t fall down and went high up and gave the best to a really enthusiastic public that deserved this from us and much more from the sound system.
For us, when making music, sound is the most important and needs to have enough quality and pressure. Myself, I also had problems with my conga microphones and got really angry at some points. I apologize because I wasn’t even at 50% of my possibilities, and congratulate Sergio who drove the percussion section practically alone with a high power.
This is a constructive criticism to the festival, telling them that it’s impossible to make an acoustic group get a proper sound with no proper line check. How can you line check with a DJ making music at the same time on the same stage? Bad for him and for us. First time in our life we’ve had this situation. That’s only possible for hip-hop groups that are based on a DJ and so don’t need to find the right sound for each acoustic instrument because the band depends on a CD, easy!!
Our sound engineers were really depressed, after 3 fantastic gigs in North Spain where the sound was smashing, we ended the week with this terrible speakers and loudness limit. Thanks to the audience that didn’t mind and danced and vibrated all the time and made us feel really well even though we were having a real hard time with the equipment.
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(Croyden, stage right speaker system for 10,000 people)