Taming a boomy room

[rpjazzguitar]

New venue for my pbdg quartet. I went to check it out and found it to be a bit cavernous, quite echoey and with a very high background noise level.

I don't know anything about how to cope with this other than playing quietly.

Assuming you have whatever gear you need, what is the best way to handle this?

We won't have a soundman. We will have a musician in the audience who can give feedback.

[garybaldy]

New venue for my pbdg quartet. I went to check it out and found it to be a bit cavernous, quite echoey and with a very high background noise level.

I don't know anything about how to cope with this other than playing quietly.

Assuming you have whatever gear you need, what is the best way to handle this?

We won't have a soundman. We will have a musician in the audience who can give feedback.

Fill the venue with people!!

[alltunes]

yeah more audience

less reverb then you normally would use might help

[John A.]

Not much you can do. IME, cymbal wash is the biggest issue in rooms like this, so if at all possible try to keep the drums sparser and quieter than usual. And also pay close attention to guitar/piano interplay (i.e., try to be in different registers and lay out more than you might ordinarily on each other's solos).

[wintermoon]

Not much you can do. IME, cymbal wash is the biggest issue in rooms like this, so if at all possible try to keep the drums sparser and quieter than usual.

Ha, good luck w that.....

[Jimmy Smith]

Lower your bass, don't use reverb.

[murrayatuptown]

More audience is definitely a thing. I took a musical acoustics class in college in 1977 and the textbook cited the example of an old hall in England having been designed during an era of full-length dresses, suits, tophats, etc. The hall performed well until the extreme era of miniskirts, hotpants, etc., and it sounded so much worse (more reflection, less absorption) the acoustic treatments needed modernization.

Doing simple things in YOUR venue (your home, your building where practice or performances take place) is a bigger set of options, but I think the question is about a venue you will be performing in and leaving...eliminating you bringing in carpet, a painting or two on canvas, etc. I used to hang 24"/61 cm x 48"/122 cm acoustic ceiling tiles in apartments to kill echo in the years following the musical acoustics course. If carpeting where the musicians are would help, imagine you could figure out a way to convince the venue you need to bring your own large throw rugs, for some made-up medical reason. If you brought them in and took them out as part of your setup/teardown, they might just think you were crazy, or actually notice a difference and take the concept a little further based on the proof you gambled on (or actually demonstrated).

I had a phone app when I had an iPhobe, I think called ClapIR. If you could get people to be silent, you clapped your hands & it would give you reverberation times vs. frequency. I had the luxury (ONE solitary time) when my daughter was a founding member of a 'house band' at a brewery, of suggesting where to hang acoustic tiles in a horrible room. I donated some wireless mic systems to them so they were kind of open to the idea, but they decided to paint them bright colors for decor before hanging them from the ceiling. I think they still helped (until they went bankrupt for unrelated reasons). It improved from horrible to bad.

In that acoustics class, one day I was once plagued with such boredom I started counting the ceiling tiles (X x Y and multiplying). I interrupted the professor, blurting out 'Who BUILT this room? There are a different number of ceiling tiles at each end, like a trapezoid!" The prof. was impressed I actually HAD been paying attention and remarked there were no convenient units of measure like tiles on the walls, but had there been, I would have been able to recognize the ceiling and floor were also anti-parallel, cancelling flutter-echo.

I did actually learn something I used later.