If you went to see Duke Ellington Orchestra with Ella Fitzgerald singing, what the hell was that like? I assume she must have had a huge voice and I’ll bet those trumpets could play real quiet. What about if you went to see Django Rhinehart’s show at a nightclub? Acoustic guitar just playing in the room? Could you hear it? I asked a luthier friend about that once and he answered “He played a big guitar and he hit the strings really hard with a big thick pick.”
Sound reinforcement technology was pretty limited back then, but people used microphones. There certainly wasn’t any stage monitoring, so the bands probably had to set up in a way that made sense and really control their dynamics. I’m just guessing, but I imagine in the big clubs, the audience would quiet down when the singer came out and they probably didn’t sing a very long set before the band took back over and played dance tunes and louder stuff. In smaller clubs, I think they put the quieter instrument nearer the single mic and the soloists stepped up too.
But most importantly, I think the audiences were enthralled and they danced when it was swinging and they listened when it was tender and if they were at a concert hall they sat and listened and it probably sounded great, whatever it was. People didnt have music playing all day long everywhere on earth, so hearing melody and rhythm was sacred. People knew how to behave.
By the time I started performing well enough that anyone would want to listen, live music technology was getting pretty fancy. Every drum, horn, or mouth had to have its own microphone in front of it. We put electronics in acoustic instruments and covered up the sound holes. Everything had to be loud because the audience would be chatting away and then the venue would turn up the music and the people would just start shouting in each others ears. And the music suffered too - all the dynamics got lost in the shuffle. Even big shows in good venues had to play by these rules. It seems like people just forgot how to enjoy music. Even the listening venues like concert halls and folk clubs seemed to just get stuffy and dull. The 90s!
By the time the new century came along, I was wondering about trying to do shows in clubs and small venues that were quieter and more dynamic. I saw that Tommy McCarthy had one of his cafe tables in his pub wired up with an overhead microphone system to spread the sound of the Irish music sessions around the whole big venue, the Burren. I wondered if we could use something like that for a kind of song swap on an off night somewhere and see what happened. I asked Duke Levine if he could recommend a microphone that I could buy that would be able to catch the singers and make their voices a little louder than the rest of the ambient sound. He recommend an Audio Technica microphone that Del McCoury used, but thought that for our situation both sides of the mic should be able to catch the sound, so we went with a slightly different version of that type of mic - and it worked a treat. We had to fiddle with the graphic equalizer on the venue’s system, but once that was fixed we just set it the same way every show and it always worked. We added a second microphone for the back of the stage, but that one you really had to get close to for it to work, which was perfect back there.
We found that most of the time, people who came in the club could really enjoy the dynamic and kind of quiet music. And the simple set-up gave us loads of flexibility for having people drop in and sing or play with us.
That was all back in 2003. Back then, using studio microphones on stage was really not a thing except in Bluegrass, but these days a lot of acts have gotten hip the “ambient” mic idea. Basically, what we want to do is make the sound of the stage louder for the audience, and to use mic placement to make some parts of the stage louder than others. In a perfect situation, what you get is a very natural sounding music - you can do that with close-micing too, but it requires a different kind of approach and is just as difficult to achieve, depending on the venue of course.
Enter Phillip Graham, the first person I ever heard of who builds ambient style microphones specifically for live music. Basically, he does a little bit of processing in the microphones themselves to reduce the likelihood of feedback. And he makes beautiful, visually appealing bodies for the microphones too. We use his stuff, as do Milk Carton Kids, Darlingside, Old Crow Medicine Show and loads of other artists. They really suit that “gather round the mic” vibe and while its still not easy to get a great sound in every venue, its just as easy as any other way of getting good sound and has the potential of really getting good fidelity, conviviality, and visual beauty out of a stage.
You can hear Phillip talking about stuff here: https://www.sounddesignlive.com/ear-trumpet-labs-philip-graham-condenser-microphone-vs-dynamic-microphone-live-sound/
Session Americana travels with / has travelled with:
Ear trumpet Labs Edwina matched pair - anything and everything
Audio Technica 4050 - ensemble/vocals
Shure KSM32 - ensemble/vocals
Shure KSM137 - acoustic instruments
CAD C195 - vocals
Shure beta 98 - field organ
But we will use whatever is around that gets the ambient sound.