My Pace-Maker is Set to 120bpm

Every now and then, I mix sound for a reasonably large - let's call it - club. This club holds meetings in a basketball stadium which has been acoustically treated by use of theatre drapes. As effective as the drapes are, the bottom-end of the audio spectrum in this predomenantly concrete building was just out of control. The kick drum sounded like Godzilla had just shown up, the bass guitar like a dying blue whale. Everything else was rockin'. All was as good as I could hope it to be. The crowd seemed to be enjoying things too.

There was a short break in the music, and a few people got out of their seats to mingle. An old French guy (I'm talking 70+) comes up to mingle with me. However, instead of asking how I am and talking about the weather, he says in his grumpiest, Frenchest voice, "The bass in the sound is making me feel physiclly sick! I thought I was going to vomit! I cannot focus on the stage!" "Oh really?!", I said in my friendliest, trying-to-hide-how-annoyed-I-am voice. "Where are you sitting", I asked. He was sitting only about 10 metres from me. I had no excuses. I just told the guy I would see what I could do. I proceeded to ask a couple of others around me if they were experiencing any issues. They weren't.

Enter grumpy old guy #2. I actually know this guy pretty well, so his comment was particularly embarrassing. "The bass is just so loud... I thought I was going to have a heart attack!" He was serious. I felt awful. Even though Myth Busters busted the myth that very low frequencies at volumes much louder than I was running could not induce vomiting or change the rate of your heart, I felt like I needed to do something to help these old guys feel a bit better.

I had already turned the subs right down, wound the bottom out of a bunch of stuff, and run the system a little lower in volume than I really wanted to. It still wasn't enough. I then applied a trick I picked up off another guy just a few weeks ago. He uses a high-pass filter to effectively stop certain instruments and vocals from getting through the subs. Fine if you're talking about an acoustic guitar or backing vocalist, but what I was about to do felt really wrong. I put a high-pass filter on... the kick drum... then the floor tom... followed by just about everything else. I found that by filtering at 60hz, the subs just fell way back into line and sounded much more bearable. It felt really naughty, but it was for a good cause. Long live grumpy old men.