I was watching a programme on TV regarding loss of hearing and tinnitus,
A lot of people who have been in groups for yeArs have now got hearing problems, due to the high volume of amplifiers,
Which got me thinking about the volume cut offs they had in some clubs in the 70s 80s they were set to a certain volume level and if you went above that level it would cut the power off for your gear,
What a pain in the arse, in those days some guitarist still had valve amps which would take a while loo e to warm up again,
It could just be your voice on a high part of a song, and that was it cut off,
Anyone else remember them?
Alex
Never experienced that. But I remember a gig when the lighting circuit when out - but the main power was still there for the amps. So the next thing was the stage being lit up by motorcycles running in doors - till the point that the gig was all carbon monoxide'd out - not a very smart move :-) Oh, the stupidity of youth.
Not as funny as a mates gig, who wanted a dramatic entrance, couldn't afford a smoke machine - so used smoke bombs instead. The entrance was very hard to see, in fact I struggled to see my pint in my hand ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
B
Memories aye Bruno,
The things you did in your younger days,
I remember our transit van it had a leaking petrol tank so we had Jerry cans in the back with a tube to the engine when it started splattering we would put the tube in the next can, on to top o f that there were 5 of us in the van all smoking, crazy.....
Yes i remember all that stuff Alex , usually set of by the bass player in our case who was just to loud , we would have a sound check before the first set then some during the set he would vamp the sound up , then bang off !! then off again at some other point during the second half , not very show business at all and a real put down for the band , luckily it did not happen very often !
I never played a club that had automatic high decibel power shut offs but many club owners had those hand held sound level meters. They would read the levels at sound check and tell us to turn down. For some reason they never told us to turn up, lol! As the night went on we would increase volume as the crowd got louder. Although several times we overloaded the circuit breakers. We would just take a break while someone searched around in the dark to find the breaker panel to reset it. We also tried to find other plugs to split the power draw.
Ah fun times!
Farrell