How Do Environmental Factors Affect Tone?

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Len Rabinowitz

Len Rabinowitz

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Brought this up in another thread but nobody picked up on it.

Seeing Springsteen this weekend got me thinking about how tone changes over time and is affected by various things- He definitely sounded different by the end of the night from the beginning.

Some obvious factors:

Tube guitar amps- Tube definitely change tone as they heat up.
The sound man, for obvious reasons.
The musicians playing harder.
An outdoor concert on a warm, muggy night.

Some questions that came up:

How do things like heat and humidity (outdoor concert) affect computerized/transistorized equipment like the soundboard? Does the sound of the mixing board change as it heats up?

How do things like heat and humidity (outdoor concert) affect speakers and cabinets?

How do things like heat and humidity (outdoor concert) affect how sound propagates?

How does the movement of people affect the sound?

Just curious!

:confused:
 
Contrary to popular belief, the equipment performance does not really change as it "heats up". Electronic components are made to operate over a very wide temperature change. Those limits are far outside the normal operating environment, even on very hot, cold or humid days. As humans, our hearing is terribly inconsistent. How we hear things is very much affected by, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure,etc. Also, the high decibel sound at a concert causes your hearing/brain to change to protect you from hearing damage resulting from the excessive volume level. Granted, as a show progresses, the volume does increase as does the way the musicians play. The show typically does get louder and the players become more aggressive as the night goes on. The PA gets louder and often causes ear pain/fatigue when it reaches a certain threshold. As the sound gets louder, the PA can also start to distort causing additional ear fatigue. All of these factors make it appear the sound is changing but in reality, it is mostly our hearing that changes, rather than the amps and electronics. That is actually a pitfall that some amp guys fall into. They listen to an amp one day and it sounds a certain way. Then the next day it sounds different so...they change the circuit to try to reclain yesterday's tone. In fact, it is their hearing that has changed, not the amps. For me, some days everything sounds awful and other days everything sounds great. I've learned it is me and not the gear that is changing so.......you just need to accept and live with the fact that we are imperfect humans.
 
Spoken with some real elfin magic! Bring back Gandolf!
 
bruce egnater":3j8lj6mz said:
Contrary to popular belief, the equipment performance does not really change as it "heats up". Electronic components are made to operate over a very wide temperature change. Those limits are far outside the normal operating environment, even on very hot, cold or humid days. As humans, our hearing is terribly inconsistent. How we hear things is very much affected by, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure,etc. Also, the high decibel sound at a concert causes your hearing/brain to change to protect you from hearing damage resulting from the excessive volume level. Granted, as a show progresses, the volume does increase as does the way the musicians play. The show typically does get louder and the players become more aggressive as the night goes on. The PA gets louder and often causes ear pain/fatigue when it reaches a certain threshold. As the sound gets louder, the PA can also start to distort causing additional ear fatigue. All of these factors make it appear the sound is changing but in reality, it is mostly our hearing that changes, rather than the amps and electronics. That is actually a pitfall that some amp guys fall into. They listen to an amp one day and it sounds a certain way. Then the next day it sounds different so...they change the circuit to try to reclain yesterday's tone. In fact, it is their hearing that has changed, not the amps. For me, some days everything sounds awful and other days everything sounds great. I've learned it is me and not the gear that is changing so.......you just need to accept and live with the fact that we are imperfect humans.
Click to expand...

What a great answer- Thank you! So it is more of a human factor than anything else. That surprises me in away that the environment doesn't have that much impact. Some things must- The fact that it was outdoors, for example. I would swear that the Tourmaster (and my old Mesa) change tone as the tubes heat up- But maybe it is my ears. I do find I have to re-EQ the Tourmaster for different guitars and differnt rooms, but that is why it is so flexible.

Thanks! :D :thumbsup:
 
"All of these factors make it appear the sound is changing but in reality, it is mostly our hearing that changes"

That actually gets into a really interesting scientific/philosophical question- Is there a difference between the two? Where is the line between an objective reality of a tone and how we perceive it? Is there a difference?

Kind of ties into another thread- When is a tone so modded that it becomes a new tone? What is a new tone?

Interesting questions!

:confused: :student: :shocked: :loco: :dunno: :rawk:
 
Today I played my Mod50 x TM212 at an outdoor party in Santa Barbara and boy did my ears play tricks on me. I had my rig set up about 10 feet behind me, got my sound dialed in on stage and it sounded amazing to me - rich, meaty, gorgeous. But as I walked off the stage I found the tone started to sound really funny the further away I got from my amp - thin, fizzy, etc. I don't know if it was my ears or what! But my sound was very directional too (I had the back cover off the 212). When I stood in front of the stage at the board, I could hear myself well, but over the mains as I went left or right of the board, I was almost nonexistent because I sounded loud enough from my stage volume that the sound guy didn't hear the need to turn me up in the mix. I think I need another 212 to help spread the sound around and give it more depth :)
 
What a great answer- Thank you! So it is more of a human factor than anything else. That surprises me in away that the environment doesn't have that much impact. Some things must- The fact that it was outdoors, for example. I would swear that the Tourmaster (and my old Mesa) change tone as the tubes heat up- But maybe it is my ears. I do find I have to re-EQ the Tourmaster for different guitars and differnt rooms, but that is why it is so flexible.

Thanks! :D :thumbsup:[/quote]
As you know I have a Tourmaster, and that amp definetely sounds better warmed up than played after turning on for just a few minutes.....my old Mesa's were like that as well
 
Totally agree on the subjective thing, there are always good and bad tone days, and it's probably more the listener than the gear or environment that changes much.

I do think though that quality of power does make a big difference and is overlooked quite often. I have quite good/clean power at my parents' house in Germany, but here in the center of Brussels it's quite bad. Probably need a power regulator and filters of some kind.

Recently I played a gig where they had power issues, they had already turned down the stage lights but still voltage was way low, like 195V-200V instead of 230V (that's at least what my cheapo Phonic "power conditioner" said) and my Axe/VHT rig as well as my mate's Bogner sounded audibly less powerful.
 
I was thinking a lot about this last night. I'm not sure you can take the receptor (in this case the human ear, nervous system, psychology, and brain) out of the equation, or out of the question of whether environment affects sound. Is it sound without the receptor, in this case the ear? Mabe not. It's just vibration, and in a sense no different from sight, which is also vibration, just at a different frequency. If you look at it as a full system, including the ear and human perception/psychology, then the environment does affect it, because without the receptor, maybe it is just vibration and not sound as such.

I always thought that if the tree fell in the forest with no one around it did make a sound. But perhaps not.

It's the difference between the engineer (Bruce) and the philosopher (me). Interesting!

:thumbsup:
 
Of course, the environment has a huge effect on "tone". Everything around you will affect what you hear, including where you stand in the venue. Listen in one position and then move over 10 feet and it will change dramatically. There are level, phasing and a gazzillion other factors that affect the sound. My point was that the components in the amplifiers do not really change over an "extended" period of time. It is very possible the tone of your amp could change a bit due to the tubes warming/stabilizing over a short period of time. I would say after 10-20 minutes, everything would be stable and not change after that. Of course other non-evironmental factors such as changing AC line voltage or sudden changes in wind direction, etc. etc., would affect things. Another though that I do not have the answer to is how temperature and humidity affect speakers. The dilemma with being a musician is that our ever changing environment makes it almost impossible to ever really be sure that what we are hearing is "the truth". How does a professional recording engineer/producer deal with the day to day changes in their hearing? They must trust their equipment 100%. With guitar amps in particular, there is also the issue of the directivity of your speakers. If your listening position changes even a little while you perform, your sound will be changing as you move. How do we deal with that.....? I say we can't get too hung up on something that we have no control over. As Frank Z. said, "shut up and play yer guitar".
One more random thougth...if you play kind of loud, and you are at or near the limit of the power of your amp at the start of your performance, by the time you get to the end of the show you have probably pushed your amp further into distortion and this will affect your tone....
 
I get it. The electronics don't change much based on the factors mentioned, but other things outside of the equipment do. So, for example, heat and humidity don't effect the mixing board much.

It does seem possible that dampness in the air might affect how sound propogates.

Thanks!

:rock:
 
For me, its first how loud the sound is reaching my ears, second what angle/distance
my ears are relative to the guitar cab and/or monitors, and third the acoustics of the venue.
The other factors are way below those three.
 
Things like humidity and temperature can absolutely affect sound in general. Sound waves will travel faster through "denser" air, or in more humid conditions. The actual components (cones and diaphragms) are usually not really affected by small changes in humidity, only the sound waves coming off of them. In my line of work (Sound system installations, ie. churches, schools, auditoriums, etc) we typically set all of our time aligning based on 75 degrees as a rule, but when we do an outdoor event, we will account for the temperature and humidity. All that being said, If over the course of a night, the temperature and humidity changes, as it usually does, the sound coming out of the PA will be different. If you're dealing with a large system, with multiple stacks, delay clusters and such, you could start to get some strange smearing and phase issues. All of this coming from a sound guy who would rather be playing any night of the week! ;)

Kyle
 
Interesting! I would have thought that it would slow down sound not speed it up. At the Springsteen show- 15,000 people; It definitely got warmer under that tent as the night went on.

If it is really humid does it affect pitch at all- Do high frequencies travel better then low ones, for example?

Thanks!
 
Actually, this giant curtain in my living room has killed my entire treble range. :confused: :confused:
 
Len Rabinowitz":wql3cejp said:
Interesting! I would have thought that it would slow down sound not speed it up. At the Springsteen show- 15,000 people; It definitely got warmer under that tent as the night went on.

If it is really humid does it affect pitch at all- Do high frequencies travel better then low ones, for example?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

The more particles in the air, the more the sound has to travel through. It's kind of like putting your ear to the train tracks, and you can hear trains miles away. It will dampen High frequencies to a degree, but pitch should remain unaffected.
 
the tone change at the point where the cab is mic'd is very little, indoors, or out. you just have to get used to your amp not sounding the same.

i played outdoor yesterday, and my stage sound was very thin, but its outdoors. i'm not going to crank my bass onstage to please myself, and piss off the sound guy.

theres little you can do about it, so sit back, turn up, and rock, or quit playing live
 
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