I'm with Ogged:
People go to concerts to feel the vibrations in their bones, to feel the energy of the interaction of the band and the crowd, to watch the performers play, and, ultimately, to feed their will to power get laid achieve zen. But the music sounds worse. It's too loud, or you can't hear it, or it's garbled, or mixed improperly, or the performer is having an off night, or...always something. If I want an "experience," I might go to a concert, but if I want to actually hear music, I'll put on a CD.
I'm always torn. On the one hand, I have a perforated eardrum, which makes it physically painful to get too close to the speakers; also, I have a lot of friends who like to stand very close to the speakers.
On the other hand, I like watching people perform. And my living room is not big enough to hold a mosh pit, as we discovered at my housewarming.
You are right that live music can be iffy. Too loud, badly mixed, badly miked or the hall can have bad acoustics. I go to a lot of concerts and avoid multi-use places or places I know to be bad. A club or concert hall with a good sound system has generally dealt with problems like echo. The band just has to plug in and get it right at sound check. A place where piles of rented equipment is set up the day of the show has a much greater chance of sucking. I'm in Denver and most of the dedicated concert halls in the area range from great to good. I saw Flogging Molly Saturday at the 'good' place and it sounded very good. I was standing by the mixing booth on the floor and all the instruments were audible without any overwhelming others. I can handle loud. I'm sorry for your perforated eardrum. I hope you use some of those concert hearing protectors. I've heard some work well and allow a balanced sound through.
Steve
The one and only rock concert I have ever gone to (the first and the last) was Rush in Dallas, the Test For Echo tour in the late 90's. I loved it, had a great time; it was an experience, to be sure.
Maybe it's just now that I'm old and over the hill (41 in January), but I derived just as much or more satisfaction from the Rush in Rio and Rush 3 concert DVDs as I think I would have from actually being in the audience; and at far less cost.
Just one point, though. There are concerts and there are concerts. Going to a James Taylor concert or the Grand Ole Opry is unlikely to be the earsplitting "experience" a White Zombie gig would be.
What about CDs of live music? For some acts, the imperfections of live performance results in some of their best music. And CDs are cheaper than concert tickets, and result in less secondhand smoke inhalation.
I think there's this social aspect to going out in general that is about finding people that are similar to you in one way or another. For a long time, a lot of that identity was forged in shared or common interests, to include music. So, it must be a social experience and not purely a musical experience. There's also a social angle to interacting with the actual performers. No one is sitting at home applauding to a live CD (or screaming or throwing articles of clothing or bouquets of roses, etc.) The visceral experience of watching the creation of the sounds of itself is a big part of it- no one wants to go to a concert where you can't actually see the performers, unless perhaps they can't actually see.
So, why do you listen to music anyway?
???
The sound quality may be better at home on a CD, but that doesn't necessarily mean the music is better. After all, the music that is played live is often very different than the music on a CD - the notes, the arrangements, the instruments, etc. may be quite different. And that's not the "experience", it's the music.
Yeah, I've had a running battle with my wife on that for the past 15 years. My theory is that for the price of 2 concert tickets you can go buy every CD that the Artist ever made -- and then listen to them over & over & over.
By the way: Why does a perforated eardrum make loud music physically painful?? I also find loud music to be very painful (but only in my left ear) and I don't have a perforated eardrum -- as far as I know.
I hear this argument all the time. I bought it when I was a teenager, and I thought watching videos of concerts or people playing on late-night shows captured the sound fairly well. It doesn't. I've been to many, many shows that sound better than the band's recordings. "Too loud" is a weak criticism in these days where hyperlimiting is popular; in fact, many modern big-budget CDs are too loud and the format fails to capture the range of the sound, so we get something that sounds very muddy. Meanwhile, in the world of indie rock, many CDs aren't loud enough, or were recorded on cheap equipment, and live performances sound much stronger.
Aside from that, some bands are just meant to be heard live; this is especially obvious for jam, psyche, or noise bands. It's maybe less obvious for acoustic-type music, but an artist's stage personality can eke into fresh song renditions too, making the show versions more intense.
I've seen plenty of bands that sound worse live as well. It's not a fixed thing. Some bands just suck live. Sometimes a venue or crowd sucks. But I don't buy that it's the norm.
Although I have been to concerts where the sound hasn't been that good, I find that to be more the exception than the rule. Most concerts I have gone to have excellent sound. Certainly at least some of the draw for the concert is in the total experience but if it is for a good live band, I think that just the listening experience is usually at least as good as a CD.
Aside from that, some bands are just meant to be heard live; this is especially obvious for jam, psyche, or noise bands.
Yep. I mean, is Megan too young to ever have gone to a Grateful Dead show? Even apart from the "experience", the music was very different from the CDs.
>physically painful to get too close to the speakers; also, I have a lot of friends who like to stand very close to the speakers.
Then hang out by the soundboard while your friends mosh. The sound is better there anyway, and you're closer to the bar.
Your friends don't have perferated eardrums too?
A good stereo at home is a much better listening experience, though there are some good venues out there. Live is generally a social thing.
I saw Nickle Creek at Michigan theater (wish they played the hill). That was nice, but assigned seating... not your thing.
Earlier this year I saw my friend at the Magic Bag in Ferdale. She's great, and the quality of the sound might even have been good, but it was too f'ing loud to tell anyhow. My ears were still ringing the next evening.
Obviously, anyone who sides with the recorded version of live events is no fan of metal or hardcore.
I'm with Megan. Live music is a different beast. Not better, but different. In some ways, more fun. It's communal, but sounds "imperfect". So what? A good conversation is not a written monologue. There are things going back and forth, given and take, side roads and back alleys.
I'd agree; the sound quality at many venues frankly blows. When it's impossible to distinguish the vocals because they're so low in the mix ... or, as in the case of one I went to Friday night, where there was such a misbalance of sound that the high frequencies were physically painful, it's bad.
But when it's done right, it's worth it. Some bands, and many of the good ones, are only really in their element when live. There are a lot of musicians for whom the real experience is playing live, not in sitting in the studio.
-Matt
Well, I'll qualify this by saying I'm 51 now. But for the last two decades, I've been wearing earplugs to live music. Even music in bars is painfully loud, and for no apparent purpose. Bass and drums can be loud for the "feel", but most bands just try to "out-loud" each other rather than actually providing audibly-appropriate music.
I saw the Rolling Stones indoors at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago in 2002. The music was just a blare. The only reason I could actually discern what I was hearing was because I had some 25 dbA earplugs in.
And chicks dig a geezer with earplugs in. My wife does, anyway.
Live=music CD=recording 2 totally different animals. What most folks don't understand is that the CDs and DVDs they love so much have been chopped and diced and massaged so much in the studio that the original sounds created by the musicians are virtually gone. This is good for listening on a sound system at home because it is basically an artificial reproduction, a representation, of the original music. Its sort of like the difference between watching a movie or seeing a play. The movie uses all the highly developed tricks of production to manipulate you while a play has to stand on it own legs. (Actually, I'm a musician and record producer and for me its more like the difference between seeing a picture of an eclair and eating an eclair, but we all have our cross to bear.) Real music means going somewhere to watch real people push air; to feel the sound hanging in a room. (That's what is happening when you hear music. You may not realize it, but it is.) It seems the problem many of you have is that you like seeing very popular bands which requires going to a big, expensive concert with lots of other fans where you'll be listening through a huge sound reinforcement system. There are other options. You can go to small venues and see bands before they get 'famous.' The problem with this is that it requires having enough knowledge of music to tell who's good without the mass media 'informing' you...
Wow not just torn, but literally torn.
I once went to a metal bar with coworkers: quite the people-watching experience. After, they were deaf, whereas I just took out the plugs. Long hair was made for that.
With certain exceptions - Brian Eno comes to mind - if it isn't improved by live performance, it isn't likely to be particularly interesting. A lot of what makes music interesting happens in the moment.
As an entirely irrelevant aside, is it that weeks are longer than I thought, or is Meghan's multifunction printer The Da Vinci Code of the gadget world? If there truly is a gadget of the week, I eagerly await the next entry (she could have posted her Kindle comments in that section, for instance), not because I give a damn about gadgets, but because that "It's a Dalmation, and it's also a delicious instant breakfast drink!" line keeps on putting the taste of dog directly into my mouth, where it most certainly doesn't belong.
I just went to see a guy named Dana Leong play here in Hanoi on tour; he's an NYC-based jazz/hip-hop guy, plays cello and trombone at near virtuoso level, with a quartet (a multi-keyboards guy, Latin-jazz drummer, and a dancehall-oriented MC). His music sounds like crap, recorded. Live, it's extraordinary. What happens when it's recorded is that the listener's conscious identification of sound with performer disappears; you can no longer hear where a sound is coming from, or who is producing it. That's because Leong uses a lot of electronic manipulation, live as well as recorded. When it's live, you can actually see what he's doing, how he's manipulating sound and where it comes from. Recorded, that disappears into the unattributable aether of production. Leong and his band play a wide range of styles, from Stevie Wonder to dancehall reggae to Eastern-infuenced, uh, pop or something, but the mentality is bebop. And bebop is the most personalistic music in the world: you have to hear each instrument as a personality, or it makes no sense.
As the digital age cheapens the value of high production levels and orchestration, personal flavor and immediate presence is increasingly at a premium. I'm rooting for the entire infrastructure of recorded music to collapse, and for the world to trend towards a digital neolithicism of small crowds huddled around touring performers, both analog and digital.
If you can't tell where the sound is coming from or who is producing it, either you need a better stereo or they need a better producer.
Making a recording is an art. Or at least it should be.
Uhhh....so what I get is none of you guys listen to a lot of jazz -- where the "Ogged" comment is just plain wrong. The live concert can be superb and often better than the recordings (although, sure, of lesser audiophile sound quality).
I always wear earplugs at shows, so I can hear the music, and hear things the next day.
And re. the experience factor, that's definitely true - hearing Sunn O))) live involves feeling the music through the air and floor and something like 15kw of amplification, at 120db; I wouldn't have room for the equipment to replicate that at home, and I think I'd need new wiring. Plus I'm not sure I'd want to do that at home.
And for that market, contra John W. - whose point is quite correct for major name acts, with $12 tickets you can barely get one used CD for the price of a ticket - for "indie" acts rather than major names, live shows are quite affordable.
I find that my interest in seeing a musical act live is directly proportional to how much I enjoy said musical act's recordings. That is, with ticket prices as high as they are now, I don't waste my time with groups I like, only those I love. And luckily for me, those bands are talented enough that their live performances are great treats. Back in my younger days, when concert-going was as much a social event as a cultural one, the quality of the shows I saw was much lower, because I didn't really love the groups to begin with, I was just tagging along with a bunch of friends. This was especially true for events like the annual HFStival at RFK stadium where I only liked perhaps 50% of the acts.
do you no a good place to have a live concert for my band we play ROCK!!!!!!!!!!