On the Road Not Taken by Paul Dodgson

Author:Paul Dodgson [Dodgson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783527779
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2019-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

Born Making Noise, 2016

When I was on stage at Bristol Old Vic, I was surprised by the sound of my voice through the speakers and the different dynamics of an amplified guitar, so a couple of days before Glastonbury Calling I book two hours in a rehearsal room. Dockside Studios is on the first floor of an old industrial building and I look out of a dirty window to the boatyard, marina and brightly painted houses on the hill across the harbour. Steve – one of the studio owners – fiddles with the PA controls and tries to make the reverb work. He can’t and leaves me alone in a little room with blue acoustic tiles on the walls and PA speakers suspended from the ceiling. In the kitchen, the subtle changes of pressure applied to the strings means the volume increases subtly and blends with the ambient acoustic of the room. In the rehearsal space I am surprised by the sudden increase in loudness. It all sounds so harsh and every mistake and wrong note is amplified too. It is ironic that forty years after I craved amplification, I have to learn to be loud again. I run through song after song, discovering how far to be from the microphone and how hard to strike the guitar. In quieter songs I learn to sing in a whisper and still be audible. This is exciting, as the dynamic range – the quietest to the loudest sounds – can be enhanced, which means variety for anyone listening; something I cannot achieve in the kitchen. The loudest songs are the hardest to control and I fight the volume of the guitar by raising the level of my voice. I am not breathing properly and start to cough. The last half hour is spent running through the set list, one song straight into another, and by the end both my fingers and throat are hurting. I have new admiration for Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and everyone else I’ve seen on stage belting it out for over two hours without a break.

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