In my humble opinion bluegrass music sounds best on a front porch, or in someone’s kitchen, or under a canopy in a festival campground.
About 20 years ago when Mac Martin came to California for a series of shows I “interviewed” him for a story in the Bluegrass Breakdown at the same time Peter Thompson was taping Mac for his Bluegrass Signal radio show on KALW in San Francisco. I actually pretty much sat still and took notes to stay off Peter’s tape.?
When we were done Peter invited me to come along to his (and Kathy Kallick’s) house in Oakland where a bunch of music friends were coming by to pick. I remember standing in a corner of the Thompson/Kallick kitchen while the most heavenly music filled the room. I remember Kathy being there, and Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum, and (I think) Tom Bekeny and a few others. Great pickers in a small, acoustically friendly room. Blisss.
Years ago my wife and I were on our way back from a weeklong backpack trip into the Marble Mountain Wilderness in far northern California and we had eaten dinner in the little town of Dunsmuir, north of Mt. Shasta, and were taking a walk along the (very small at that point) Sacramento River when I spotted a residential lot containing a front porch. Nothing else, just a very obvious “front porch.”
I was standing there staring at it when an old man walked up and said, “It is a front porch. My son built it to play music on, with his friends.” Turned out the son lived a few doors down in a building that was flush with the sidewalk and had no room for a porch. I ended up knocking on his door and we spent the evening picking (in the living room, not the porch). I was totally impressed that he would build something like that. I have always wanted a big front porch but my house fills most of my small, urban lot, so no dice.
The next best thing is a great sound system. But I spend most of my musical life on what I like to call “the lowest rung of the show-biz ladder,” namely senior living places, farmers markets, and children’s story hours at libraries, so top quality sound reinforcement is not something I experience frequently.
When I first started out I was not even aware of the existence of monitors. The first time I ever played through a system where I could really hear myself was back in about 1974 when the band I was in at that time got invited to do a live radio show broadcast from a club/restaurant in Vallejo. We started to play and I was startled to hear us, all together, sounding great!
In those days we were playing mostly pizza parlors and private parties, so we relied on a rudimentary system that, alas, had no monitors.
For many years I was a volunteer at the CBA Music Camp. A major perk of that job was getting to play a song with my fellow volunteers on the small stage at Grass Valley, with Paul Knight handling sound. I understood right away why so many bands thank Paul for making them sound good, both in the crowd and on the stage.
About five years ago we played two autumns running at a big harvest festival at the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds, where I discovered a whole ’nother approach to sound. The “system” was two Bose L-1 units, linked to a microphone mixer. Each was a little box about the size of three shoeboxes stacked, and a tower about four feet high poking out the top with six small speakers in each tower. I was very dubious that this thing would work well, because the “tower” was just a little bit bigger than a wood 2×4. And the units were positioned slightly to the rear and to the side of the band. Wouldn’t we get feedback?
Short answer: no. The sound was crisp, clear, and plenty loud. Very pleasurable to play through. I put that Bose system on my “want” list for when I get rich.
Just last week we encountered another great sound system in an unlikely place, although it was the second time we had used it, having played there two years ago. It was a show for the Menlo Park Friends of the Library, but they held it at the city council chambers. That is a great acoustic room, odd shaped-carpeted and with built-in seats — no echoes to speak of.
A little hatch in the floor opens and you can plug your mikes into the house system, and the sound is glorious. Again, no need for monitors as the entire band can hear itself. And the system reproduces banjo sounds so perfectly I was smiling inside all during the show.
So now it’s back to battery-powered amps, until the next time the gods of sound smile upon us.
(Facebook people can check the Menlo Park Library’s page for some clips of that show. Scroll down a bit as they add things all the time.)
