Audio 101 for Musicians, Dancers, DJ's, and Venue Promoters

Hi Friends,

When you go to a dance, whether the music is live or DJed, I think we can all agree that you enjoy the music a lot more when it sounds:

1. Clear

2. Like the artist intends/intended

If the first is lacking, you can't really tell what you're listening to, and if the second is lacking then you're not really getting the full experience of what the artist wants to convey with his or her music.

Let's take a look at some of the problems that make jazz music, both live and DJed, less authentic and less enjoyable for us to dance to!

Live Music

Back in the 1930's, when the music that we love to dance to was first created, musicians didn't have access to the kinds of audio equipment we have today and most bands had 1 mic out in front of the group and that was it. After WW2, more advanced audio equipment was available to performers that allowed them to mic all of the individual instruments in a band.

Would musicians in the 1930's have used this technology to them had it been available? ABSOLUTELY!!! (Bet you never thought you'd hear me say that.) Many musicians would have been trying out these new technologies, but this would have had a profound impact on the music. Giving Duke Ellington enough mics to put on every member of their his band in 1928 would have drastically altered the course of music history, because there are numerous things that can be done electronically with volume and balances between instruments that cannot be achieved acoustically. Mr. Ellington, great composer that he was, would have explored every dynamic and timbral possibility at his fingertips and it's very likely that the music we love would never have been created.

But Mr. Ellington and his contemporaries were NOT handed state of the art 2010 sound equipment in 1928 and, thus, they created music meant to be performed acoustically.

Now let's for a moment say that you go to hear a classical cello recital, and the cellist plays one of the Bach Suites, but instead of playing it in the appropriate Baroque style, he plays it like it's Brahms. Well, certainly interesting, but not tasteful. (For those of you who aren't classical music fans, this is sort of the equivalent of a Death Metal cover of Yellow Submarine, interesting, probably not tasteful and certainly not what the composers intended.) This is something that just isn't done in the realm of classical music, because musicians and audiences generally have a better understanding of what is and isn't tasteful and artistic.

In jazz there's a much more free feeling among many musicians and most listeners about what to expect from a band. I mean it's improvisational right? So do whatever you want to! Of course, for audiences looking to dance swing era dances to swing era music, there's something to be said for tasteful performance of music from this era because it enhances your listening experience and also provides you the opportunity to have an authentic dancing experience, a chance to dance the lindy hop the the music that it was inspired by, that it goes with.

There is a physicality to acoustic music that no sound system on earth can recreate, try as it might, an electronic cone vibrating back and forth is never going to sound the same as the complex vibration of a guitar or clarinet reed vibrating. This is something you can feel, but it's also something that you hear, even if you don't recognize it.

Even the most untrained musical ears can hear the difference between the sound of a trumpet and a guitar, or a clarinet and a violin. The sound quality of a particular type of instrument is called its timbre (pronounced like tambur).

So if a trumpet and a violin both play the same note, what makes them sound different? Overtones.

Whenever I play a note on the guitar, the string vibrates and a pitch is created, but the in addition to that pitch, a variety of other pitches also sound simultaneously; they sound much more softly than the fundamental pitch, but they are there. The vibrating of the string then (practically instantly) starts the whole body of the instrument vibrating. Based on the shape of the instrument, the kind of wood its made from, and a myriad of other factors, some of those overtones sounded by the string vibrate more loudly, or more resonantly, than others. The instrument's vibrating then begins vibrating the air around the instrument until that air reaches your ear, begins vibrating your ear drum, which vibrates little bones in your ear which passes the sound to a membrane with little hair-like sensors that translate these sounds into neural signals and send them to your brain. (And this all happens in a split second!) When someone plays the same note on a different instrument, different overtones are created, and sent to your ear and your brain registers that different collection of sounds as whatever instrument is being played!

Now, when we add amplification to the mix, we make the process infinitely MORE complicated. A sound travels out of the instrument into the air just like before, but instead of reaching your ear, it goes into a microphone which through use of a magnet, turns the sound waves into electric current. This current then passes through wires and through numerous circuits which reproduce the same fluctuations of current over and over, until the current reaches the speaker which it vibrates causing the air to vibrate around the speaker which then travels to your ear, etc etc. Whew!

The difference here is that when you make a copy of a copy of a copy as this sound passes through all that circuitry, you lose quality. Your ear doesn't respond to a cone vibrating the same way that it does an instrument vibrating, and on top of that, the cone which is one piece of equipment trying to reproduce the complex harmonic patterns of a human voice or a guitar, just doesn't have a prayer!

So why don't we all always just play acoustically? Well there's several reasons. First, most musicians today have grown up in the era of rock and roll. They've grown up with music being loud and patched together by sound engineers - their school jazz bands and jazz camps being performed with microphones - we've established a culture of miking instruments. The focus of musicians, I think, is often the internal process of playing, and not the external process of what they're communicating to their audience. Even, when musicians are trying to communicate something through their playing, a feeling, or a sound, they often don't realize that the sound system is weakening their impression on the audience because it's just the way they've always performed.

The other problem, and the reason that you still see my band using more than one mic is because the music that we play was originally created with the assumption that the stage it was performed on was going to have a band shell. An acoustical shell makes all the difference in the world in the volume and balance of a band.

Imagine being in a house of mirrors and turning on a light. It's going to be infinitely brighter to your eyes than it would be in a normal room because it's reflecting intensely off of so many surfaces. Sound reflects off of any hard surface as well, and a band shell is a big curved wall that goes behind a band that's designed to reflect the sound out to you in the audience, greatly amplifying it. There's no loss of quality with this reverberated sound like there is when you change the sound energy into electrical energy and back to sound energy with a microphone and speaker.

Unfortunately, most performing spaces today were not built with acoustic music in mind and many older venues have had their shells removed. In small spaces, it doesn't really matter, but in a big ballroom or a dance studio, it's an issue to be tackled.

So as a band leader, what kind of compromise can be made to provide the most authentic sound. Of course some mics need to be used, but when bands mic every instrument individually, it creates a vastly different sound. Instead of sound waves from the guitar and bass and piano all bouncing off of eachother and going into a mic together, they each go separately into a mic and are "mixed" by a sound engineer. When the sounds are reproduced by a speaker, you hear the sound of a speaker vibrating, trying to produce copies of each of these three individual sounds. This is opposed to the more natural sound of the speaker getting one message of all three sounds already blended together and trying to accurately copy that. The other thing that you lose with close miking is the resonance of the space you're in. Just like the body of the guitar resonates, the stage, the walls of the room, the other instruments, even your body resonate sympathetically with the instruments amplifying the sound. When you close mic instruments, this resonance is not captured, just the pure sound of the instrument, which is a much less interesting sound.

Of course the copy isn't going to be perfect either way, but the electronic equipment is meant to keep those sounds pristine and separate from one another as opposed to the more natural sound of the sound waves from those instruments knocking into each other.

So the compromise, for the time being anyway, is to try to use as few mics as possible to adequately pick up everyone in the band. That way the sounds are more blended and natural before entering the PA system which will slightly degrade the sound of the whole band as opposed to slightly degrading the sound of each instrument and also preventing them from blending with one another.

The other advantage to this, is that it gives the band far more control over the balance of their instruments and blend of their group than does the individual miking method which puts control of the band's sounds into the hands of an audio engineer who in all probability does not spend a great deal of his or her time listening to and studying 1930's jazz and also probably doesn't care if your band sounds authentic, so long as A. they get paid, and B. no one in the audience complains specifically about his or her work. (There are of course a very few exceptions to this rule, some wonderful sound engineers who really care about what you're trying to create).

DJed Music

This brings me to DJed music. DJed music is in swing dancing is a means to have music when it is not possible to have a live band. Our community has, however developed a culture of dancing to DJed music due largely to the small number of quality and available bands. DJs have a responsibility to faithfully represent the music that they love. Newcomers expect the music to sound like the club music because DJs try to make their sets more "accessible" by EQing music in a totally unrealistic way, louder than a band would naturally play it and with the bass thumping. People will listen to your set even if it doesn't sound like P-Ditty and if they don't they either need more time to appreciate the style of music or just don't like the same kind of music that you do. I know we want to keep people coming back to hear us spin, but if numbers is the goal then just play the P-Ditty record (or Kanye West or whatever the devil it is the children listen to these days). This is especially bad when a DJ spins breaks for a band and the break music is louder than the band. Nothing sucks the energy out of a night faster!

Swing music is, whether live or DJed, not supposed to be so loud that you can't enjoy it. When I go to hear a band or a DJ and the sound is unnatural and distorted and so loud that I can't even catch my dance's partner's name, it's just not a good time. If people can't hear in the back, don't make the sound in the front louder, put a speaker in the back and spread the rhythm around.

Cheers,

Glenn