You sound like shit live.  No matter where you play, you sound like shit.  Big venues, small venues, it doesn’t matter.  You think you sound awesome?  You’re wrong.  You sound like shit.

The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad plays a lot of shows at a lot of venues with a lot of different bands.  Many of these bands are technically awesome and have amazing songs, but there’s no way to tell because they sound like a big pile of shit.

Some common symptoms of sounding like shit:

• Indistinguishable vocals. 
  
• Constant feedback
  
• "Buzz saw" guitar
  
• Snare sounds like you’re hitting a wet cardboard box
• Kick drum fights with the bass guitar for all the low frequencies, and they both lose.
  

It’s a mess, and everyone tunes out or leaves after 2 minutes.  Sorry, you’ve failed.

The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad have been playing live since 2005. We've been fortunate enough to have Jeff Mewbourn tape most of our performances.  His recordings don’t lie.  If we sounded like shit, we’ll know it the next day when he posts the audio.  So over the years we’ve been able to refine our stage setup to a point where we know we’ll sound as good as possible at any venue we play.  Because of lousy acoustics or a bad sound person, we might still sound terrible at any given gig, but we’ll still sound better than the rest of the bands on the bill.

Your Big Amp Is Annoying is written by Ryan Graham, lead guitarist and producer of The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad. Next Week: Some of the major setup issues most crappy-sounding live bands have in common.