[drumming diary] Gig report, Lindsie at the Rockhouse

Every once in a while, you get forcibly reminded of something you shouldn't have ever forgotten in the first place. Today, it was the value of your monitor mix. Tonight's gig seemed to go well, from an audience perspective, but I would never be able to tell from where I was sitting. All I had was bass pounding in one ear, and vocals in the other, over a vague din of guitars across the stage, and the result was me pounding away at the drums like a neanderthal. Which may have had some entertainment value, but that's not my bag, and it could have been fixed fairly easily.

The main problem I was having was that my drums sounded unusually flat. I like big, ringy tones from my drums, and on stage, they were sounding like cardboard boxes. The net result of this was that I started hitting them harder to get more sound out of them, when I should have realized that sound was coming out of them, I just couldn't hear it. Particularly the snare drum, which I could have just had brought up in my monitor to take care of it. That at least should have taken care of my own personal volume issues, although the stage volume was still massively out of whack.

In related news, I had my drums set up in the staging area at the club, which allowed me to mess around a bit with brushes while the other bands were playing, and I think I got this messed-up paraddidle modulation exercise under my fingers. More on that later.