I’m sorry to say I missed the last couple of gigs, but I’m told Christchurch had an excellent acoustic, and an attentive audience. I think those are probably the two things you need to avoid using amps. The challenging venues tend to be the ones with large open spaces, outdoors, or when there is a lot of noise from people coming and going (eg. festivals and the like). Not only does this make it difficult for the audience to hear the performers, but it can be quite hard for the performers to hear each other, which can be a death sentence for choirs because it then becomes impossible to keep in tune.

When Voicemale were offered the Fremantle Arts Center gig it was with some trepidation that we accepted, because we’ve had terrible difficulty there in the past: our last gig was outdoors, it was windy, and we had no foldback. So this time we came prepared with our own portable “acoustic shell” which the talented Terry built from some old blackboards. If you look behind the Spooks in the video, you can see the curved wall which is designed to try to contain some of the sound. Many of our singers found the foldback distracting, but we found that we could hear each other well enough with out it. Of course, the audience still got the amplified version, but in spaces like that its unfortunately unavoidable.

But I agree that nothing beats that “unplugged” sound if you have the right conditions. If you’re doing gigs by invitation you sometimes don’t have much control over this. When you’re running your own show its easier to get things right.

much appreciated

mike o’s

FYI, the video is also on YouTube.