Why are venue house bass amps always such utter sh#te?

[Chienmortbb]

1 hour ago, Lozz196 said:

A cuckoo clock?

I’d that a bass amp? 

[ASW]

My festival experience this year has been different. I've played a few festivals and venues with its own back line and it's all been quite good. There was an Aguilar Tone Hammer and 4 x 10 at one festival. I liked the amp enough to buy one myself!

 

I always carry a small pedal board with an Origin Effects Bass Rig so can DI from there if necessary. 

 

I'm sure that every gig I've played this year, we got a list of the back line and if we didn't we asked for it, so we knew what would be there to use. This enables us to ascertain whether the back line is suitable and can negotiate beforehand if we feel we needed to use our own equipment (we didn't). Admittedly, it doesn't help if the equipment doesn't work though, but still worthwhile.

 

There will always be outliers, such as the time I played a gig years ago and their "bass amp" was some child's practice amp from the 80s with a blown 8" speaker. No proper foldback either so I couldn't hear anything I was playing and taking a preamp pedal would not have helped. That was before I learned to find out what the back line was! 

Edited Tuesday at 13:23 by ASW
Typos

[agedhorse]

On 07/12/2025 at 10:54, Wolverinebass said:

It's because bass isn't valued. I now refuse to play a venue if I'm not able to use something that isn't a piece of crap. I've almost come to blows with a few sound engineers for them trying to screw with me. If anyone says "pre-eq DI only" I immediately harden my accent to "full on Taggart" and generally something said in that voice does tend to get a bit more co-operation.

 

Most live engineers are underpaid and as a result, don't give a toss. The ones who won't do what you ask when it's totally reasonable or do the exact opposite are the ones who I have massive problems with.

From this post, you must be a whole lot of fun to work with. Most players play a whole lifetime of gigs without getting “screwed” by sound engineers or coming to blows with a sound guy. 
 

I was a sound engineer (FOH) for 40 years working the international touring circuit mostly. The first time a player threatened one of the crew, they would get an introduction to the head of security, who quickly defused the situation by either compliance, or the act was cancelled. It almost never happened because this kind of behavior simply wasn’t tolerated at this level. 

Nothing screams immaturity like an act or its members throwing a “toddler temper tantrum”. 
 

 

On 08/12/2025 at 10:09, itu said:

Everything is different in Switzerland: I got a Mesa 400+ and a quality 4x10". One of the best rigs I've ever played. And chocolate, and cheese, and... 

Yup, the higher quality venues and the better acts generally end up with better backline. I don’t recall seeing junk more than a couple times a year at most, often it was really good gear. 

[Wolverinebass]

42 minutes ago, agedhorse said:

From this post, you must be a whole lot of fun to work with. Most players play a whole lifetime of gigs without getting “screwed” by sound engineers or coming to blows with a sound guy. 
 

I was a sound engineer (FOH) for 40 years working the international touring circuit mostly. The first time a player threatened one of the crew, they would get an introduction to the head of security, who quickly defused the situation by either compliance, or the act was cancelled. It almost never happened because this kind of behavior simply wasn’t tolerated at this level. 

Nothing screams immaturity like an act or its members throwing a “toddler temper tantrum”. 
 

 

With respect, you were operating at a level where things would get sorted out quickly and amicably, so the sort of situation I described wouldn't ever happen. You would be dealing with the same groups for weeks or longer at a time. You wouldn't have behaved in the way I'm about to describe and then annoy everyone more by being condescending with it which is why things got heated.

 

In the toilet/originals circuit in London where I'm sure the engineers are getting paid much less than you to do a good job, they very often don't care. Worse still, the air of impunity of action in some cases can be really bad. If it's only one night does it matter if you annoy the bands? You probably won't see them again. Who cares?

 

When you ask why they did something that has negatively affected you or your band and they tell you to f@&£off refusing to discuss it, would that not annoy you? Like one time, one muted my guitarist (he was using a helix staright into the desk) for the whole last third of a song and when asked after the gig what happened told him the exact same thing and then shoved him. No explanation, no apology. 

 

When you ask someone nicely for what you need (explaining why you need it) and they proceed to do the exact opposite is that not screwing with you? So, if you're playing in a trio the bass takes on a whole different role than in say a 5 piece with 2 guitars and making the bass all "whump" isn't going to help you or the band sound good. 

 

Admittedly, I play a more driven, lead bass style and seemingly that doesn't compute for some of them and I can't understand why as it's not that complicated. I've never asked for anything except to be able to hear myself and to point out before soundcheck that in some of the bands I've played in, the bass has played more lead figures than the guitar, so please don't cut the treble.

 

Whilst experiences like these aren't every time, it's been enough of a negative experience for me over the last 20 years that I find it depressing that in all that time, very little has changed in how bass is allowed to be presented in a live format.

 

It's worth noting that when I have played bigger venues the engineers have been great.

 

 

[Lozz196]

Yep, in incidents like this it’s the “do as little as possible that I can get away with” attitude that is prevalent. I don’t know if  this happens across the water but it certainly happens here across many forms of employment.

[LawrenceH]

@agedhorse I think you haven't met a lot of the 'engineers' working the rough end of the circuit, at least in the UK. People skills not always in abundance. I've noticed both as a player and a punter that mixing skills aren't either. Even at medium venues I noticed heavy reliance on presets and RTAs, little use of ears or musical understanding of genres. Quite a lot of them come from AV/theatre backgrounds and do live bands as a top-up.

 

Touring engineers that go with bands are generally a different proposition. Though IMO they still rely too much on presets.

[jensenmann]

On 08/12/2025 at 22:18, Lozz196 said:

A cuckoo clock?

That´s only in the Black Forest area in Germany 😘

[jensenmann]

I always bring my rig to gigs and then decide if I´ll use the provided backline or my own stuff. Since I´m a soundengineer, too, I never had a problem to communicate my needs to the local crew. In the end it´s just plugging an XLR from amp 1 to amp 2 DI out and backwards. I´ll do that for them and all is good, no more additional work for them, no complaints.

 

In my own location I have a Boogie Prodigy top + Powerhouse 4x10" as well as a rack with Sansamp RBI preamp + KMT DC3 poweramp + 2x EV15L (TL606) cabs as 2nd choice. This is clearly a serious kit. We had a few bassplayers in that were not happy, though. It always turned out that they were idiots and had no clue about sound. 

 

 

[agedhorse]

To clarify, I mostly handled international acts on the “Americas” side of the pond, both touring but later as the A1 (lead audio) in several “higher end” venues. The only UK tour I did was in the 1980’s with Taj Mahal, and I never encountered any issues. 
 

I stopped working dive type venues in the early 1980’s, realized early on that it would be impossible to make a living and raise a family. I mostly worked venues in the 1000-2500 cap range, in part because there’s respect built into that type of venue, but also because they tended to be union or union friendly facilities with clearly defined work (and safety) rules. My crew made it ~40 years without a reportable accident or injury. 
 

During this entire time, I designed pro audio and bass/guitar gear for some of the largest names in the industry during my downtime. Now that I’m retired from pro audio events, I design full time for Mesa Boogie and Gibson, It all goes hand in hand, I met others who had design “side hustles” while touring as well. The touring experience helps make good, real world, player friendly solutions for players. 

[Steve Browning]

6 hours ago, agedhorse said:

The touring experience helps make good, real world, player friendly solutions for players. 

It surely has in your case. 

[Phil Starr]

On 07/12/2025 at 14:32, Paddy Morris said:

I was pressured into playing through yet another utterly rubbish venue bass amp last night.  It was one of those gigs where loads of bands had been on, and all the other bass players had (probably reluctantly) all used the same knackered, low end Ashdown rig.  No offense to Ashdown users, they make some great kit, but this thing was an old, underpowered, thin thing.  It seemed to have a compressor button that didn't actually switch the compressor off, and seemed to pull off the trick of being simultaneously too loud but also inaudible.

 

The FoH guy had pre-rigged it with his DI box, and it was a small stage.  I felt like it would have made me look like a real dick to insist on using my own amp, which I could have got on and off the stage in less thsn 30 seconds.  But can you imagine a situation where a guitarist would allow himself to be coerced into using some knackered old amp that happend to be on stage?  There's no way on earth.

 

Also, if for logistical reasons of getting bands on and off quickly, you want everyone to use the same bass amp, well why not buy something so lovely and so flexible that no one could possibly mind using it.  But house bass amps universally seem to be sourced from skips outside the local Cash Converters.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. (I enjoyed looking up Hanlon's Razor, some variations can be quite rude  )

 

These venues are probably barely breaking even and are giving a chance to musicians who can't organise their own gigs or get their own gear to a venue. A few turn up with no instrument. Some of the musicians will show litle respect to the gear provided. The 'roadie' doing the sound may have had little or no training and not be the person who set the gear up. They won't want to unplug anything because they won't know how to reconnect it for the next act. They may be there because they are the only person available and not because of any skill they have. The logistics of running a multi band event with people you've never met are overwhelming at times and with little or no funding the options of buying in or hiring equipment out of the question.

 

The best thing you can do is look after yourself at these events. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Take your own gear and have it set up so you can do a quick change. Take your own DI and ask them if they want to plug into yours or where you can plug into theirs. If they don't put the bass through PA be prepared for that. If possible just set your stuff up next to or in front of their bass amp and do it quickly. Arrange a signal so you can turn up or down if they need you to. Give them confidence that you know what your are doing and that they can trust you to be helpful. Arguing with someone who is already anxious and under time pressure is never going to come out well so avoid giving them a decision to make.

 

 

[Chienmortbb]

9 hours ago, agedhorse said:

The touring experience helps make good, real world, player friendly solutions for players

I met one of Free's roadies, just after a tour of the USA (1971 or 1972?). He was bemoaning the fact that they insisted on using their Marshall stacks rather than lightweight Fender combos. At that time, I was an amateur guitarist and studying Electronics at college and in the in-house training school at EMI. I tried to explain that they could not sound like Free through Fender Combos, but he rolled his eyes and moved on to the next victim. 

 

At that time there was no PA support apart from vocals. 

Edited 22 minutes ago by Chienmortbb