Spinal tap speakers go to 11

Standard amps and speakers have volume controls that only go up to ten. Members of Congress own special amps, too. And they sure used them. In a statement, Sen. And Sen.

===

We are searching data for your request:

Wait the end of the search in all databases.
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.

Content:

• This is Spinal Tap
• 'Spinal Tap': 11/11/11 is Nigel Tufnel Day
• Spinal Tap Band T-Shirts
• Hello Cleveland! Nine embarrassing Spinal Tap moments that happened in real life
• Robot or human?
• A brief history of cranking the volume up to 11 — and beyond
• The Science of "Spinal Tap"
• Look out Bose – How to turn your Andro packaging into DIY speakers

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: These go to Eleven... — \

This is Spinal Tap

High volume in the form of high sound pressure level SPL is ingrained in the aesthetics of many forms of popular music, most obviously in rock and its associated sub-genres, but also in many other genres and styles including various forms of dance music, hip hop, reggae and electronic music. The primary site of expression of the notion of loud-as-good is in the performance of music in public spaces or venues live, recorded or a blend of both.

This essay identifies five discourses of loudness as they appear in music journalism, and in fiction. These are: loud-as-good, loud-as-bad; loud-as-good for the audience, but bad for the journalist; loud-as-good for the journalist, but bad for the audience; loud-as-irrational. Work elsewhere addresses the ways in which the human ear and brain perceive and process volume levels, and so underpin broader arguments about why loud-as-good might have become central to rock in particular Blesser, This article is however concerned with discourses of loudness as they appear in music journalism and selected other texts, and the extent to which these representations reflect, reinforce, or contradict orthodox rock ideology of loud-as-good.

The research presented here starts in It was also the year in which MTV launched in the US in was becoming a cultural force that would change the ways in which live performances were understood Shuker, ; Frith et al. Not only were MTV and its imitators new and powerful channels for mediation and dissemination of popular music, they marked a shift towards an increasing emphasis on visual spectacle and the reproduction of video performances in the live context Frith, It may be that with the waning of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal NWOBHM towards the end of Waksman, ; Tucker, and the rise of the post-New Romantic pop that formed much of the so-called second British Invasion of the US pop charts Rimmer, , that many mainstream music journalists had issues other than volume to address in live concert reviews.

Waksman argues that post-NWOBHM, metal diverged into more mainstream pop-metal and underground hardcore, thrash and speed sub-genres. Speculatively, the consequences of this could have been that pop and glam metal in the s became less about volume and more about the spectacle of live performance.

Underground metal genres were less likely to be covered by the UK music weeklies, whilst issues of high volume may simply have been taken as understood by rock and metal press specialist publications such as Metal Hammer and Kerrang! The main section of the essay explores discourses of loudness in rock criticism, and within that primarily the live concert review in specialist music journalism from to The concluding section sums up the key issues, considers the implications of the research presented here for our understanding of the historical evolution of discourses of loudness in rock, and the potential for future work in this field.

Where though might be the sites of reproduction of this discourse? In song titles and album names, certainly. More significant are the mediating texts around rock, which form an historical context in which evolution and circulation of particular discourses can be tracked and analysed.

When radio does broadcast live performances there is little commonality between the sonic experience of being present at a live rock show and that of listening on headphones or on a portable radio set, even through amplified a high quality hi-fi system. It is in other media that discourses of loudness are reproduced, notably though not only in music journalism.

This article explores the extent to which a discourse of loud-as-good is present in the music writing that was so important to the development and propagation of rock ideology in the s and s Lindberg et al. The research seeks to establish how one strand of rock discourse loud-as-good is woven through a broader set of ideological values associated with live music performance, and to consider the implications of that discourse.

As a first move towards a wider ranging consideration of discourses of volume, my focus here is on accounts of live music performance. A critical analysis of live music reviews and the ways in which volume is associated positively or negatively with the perceived aesthetic value of a specific performance affords an opportunity to explore the underpinning ideology and myth-making of one strand of late 20 th century popular music culture.

The research presented here suggests that the discourse of loud-as-good was indeed present in rock writing from , but that there is also a competing discourse of loud-as-bad. Waksman quotes Walser , who attempts to explain why volume matters in heavy metal:. They argue that for some fans at least, endurance of the pain or discomfort caused by very high sound levels can be central to the live music experience.

This essay shows that music journalists deploy discourses of loudness in several different ways, often as a way of demarcating themselves from not only mainstream popular culture, but also from other members of the audience.

Amongst other things they also consider the gendering of loudness discourse, pointing to work by Bosma 1 which suggests that:. None of the music journalists here are women, and only one band mentioned in passing in a Ted Nugent live review, no less features any women in the line-up X-Ray Spex, with Poly Styrene and Lora Logic.

It would therefore not be difficult to situate these discourses of loudness in popular music as male-gendered, even musculinist. The next section addresses some key examples of loud-as-funny or more precisely, loud-as-irrational.

This section discusses two high profile satirical treatments of the irrationality of very high volume levels and their parallels in real-world rock culture.

At a time index of What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff … you know what we do? Marty: Put it up to 11? Nigel: One louder. This series of amps which had the same nominal W power output as their predecessors, used a volume scale of rather than the traditional In the promotional video 20 , Tufnel is interviewed by Marty Di Bergi-esque figure.

Tufnel responds:. Um, perhaps as loud as 30 actually. The music I am now doing on my own, solo, is purely decibel related. All just bursts of noise, which for me, makes it necessary to have 20 or more, you see […]. A lot of people who worked on the [Atom] Bomb actually work for Marshall. This is a reflection of the counter-intuitive way in which Spinal Tap, a fictional band, was almost immediately embraced by mainstream rock culture whose participants were apparently more than happy to be seen to be able to laugh at themselves and the more absurd aspects of music industry.

In the case of Marshall Amplification, the company and Jim Marshall himself were happy to use a fictional and dim if hilarious parody of a lead guitar player in their promotional campaigns.

Crucially, it was not the hardware itself that was being mocked, rather it was rock culture more broadly—a culture which was happy to be seen to be capable of laughing at itself.

In late Deep Purple released what is now considered to be one of the most definitive live concert albums, Made In Japan. A bit more monitor, if you got it. In other words, very loud indeed.

The contradiction is really only apparent from outside of rock culture—Blackmore himself seems perfectly at ease with working in an environment where both discourses co-exist.

When music critics describe the loudness of a band they are probably referring to the sound levels coming from the front-of-house PA system, regardless of how impressive the Marshall speaker stacks behind the band. The band evidently liked the title enough to reuse it in a slightly modified form for a double-CD live album, recorded the previous year in Hamburg , Everything Louder Than Everyone Else.

Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some 37 miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet, or more frequently, around a completely different planet […]. I include this example not just because it is funny but because it is an early and sophisticated appearance of rock culture satire in other media, and probably the first to do so in the context of a science-fiction comedy.

More importantly, the idea of a concert being so loud that it sounds better a very long way from the stage is one which is less ridiculous than Adams had perhaps imagined, as will become apparent shortly. In this case however the demarcation is rather more nuanced, as Jahn seems to understand the intentionality of the volume, even if he himself is excluded by virtue of his age rather than as a consequence of his own taste in music.

At first, it sounds like one big roar, with individual parts barely discernible. As a matter of fact, you might as well forget it if you are over 19 or I am 25 and supposedly a specialist at this music, and I am having trouble. So, several years before the argument was codified in advertising for a Ted Nugent live album about which more later Jahn is making an argument that extreme volume is not for older rock fans.

This is part of another, well documented discourse of rock and youth Frith, ; Keightley, , here with an upper limit of The parts are at first indistinguishable from each other. Al Aronowitz, writing in Rolling Stone , observes that despite the progressive intentions of the Tommy project, the crowd were expecting more than a straight reading of the songs from the album:.

Yet in terms of volume, The Who made no concession to the venue. Nevertheless, in his invocation of amplification-as-monolithic-building there is a sense of the physical embodiment of loudness in amplifiers and speaker stacks which foreshadows the visceral experience of the volume to follow.

In the November issue of Beat Instrumental , guitarist Tony Iommi explains to an uncredited writer why loud is good:. We played so loud one night that a lot of the tiles on the roof cracked and fell off. In a January issue of Record Mirror , Iommi develops the link between volume and aesthetics:. The only people who complain about our being loud appear to be the writers but we never get any complaints from our audience. Also present here is the notion of journalist-as-other who cannot understand music in the same way as fans.

In this example though it is a musician making the argument that rock critics are not like fans, and for this reason it is the music writer that is wrong. Given the likely consumption of alcohol and other drugs at the concert it may of course be that noise levels alone were not solely responsible for the fate of the fainting rock fans. This though is irrelevant—the important aspect of the World Record story is that volume is cited as being capable of knocking out gig-hardened rock fans, and that this says something positive about the show in question.

One time they was playing such a vibrating set that the twerp next to me got his insides all shooken up and barfed all over my cowboy boots. I shoved his face in his own puke. There is also an interesting subversion of audience-as-other in this example—Hull positions himself as more of a fan than at least one other audience member, and his super-fan status is manifested in his ability to cope with the extreme sound levels delivered by Deep Purple.

Of course it may or may not be true that events unfolded as described here, but this is not the point—the discourse is present. Slade had a significant number of UK hit singles in the early s, but despite their status as a chart band they were also very much a rock group Roberts, Elsewhere there is some elaboration of the experience of high volume shows. Jeez, they were loud; yet paradoxically their balance was clear. There could be any number of reasons for this unexpected clarity, though first amongst them might be that open air stages typically have no in-door hall acoustic issues.

Nevertheless this is clearly loud-as-good, in this case not for metal or hard rock but for a blues-rock-boogie group. For Stewart it was surprising that the sound at the this show was good, despite the volume. It is also very loud without being unbearable. However, his writing here is one of the more poetic accounts of volume in rock criticism.

The volume levels render the concert pointless for Bell but given that the rest of the review is largely negative in tone, the critique of the live sound is only part of his overall disappointment with the concert. It is nonetheless one of the most unambiguous examples of loud-as-bad discourse. In fact, contrary to all the hype, Nugent is not that loud. The Who could probably drown him out any day of the week. Between encores, he left his guitar propped against his stacks, producing uncontrolled feedback.

This was the only time that the sound got anywhere near pain threshold. The Who in are still clearly understood as a loud band, but the only uncomfortably loud segment of the Nugent concert, for Farren at least, is when no-one is actually playing on stage.

They say Ted and his boys wear earplugs on stage and I can well believe it. It is easier and cheaper to sound very loud in a very small space, but de Whalley sees the experience as essentially the same regardless of ideological differences between punk and mainstream rock.

This is the only explicit example in the journalism analysed here of rock and punk bands appearing in the same piece, although for de Whalley at least there is no clear distinction between punk volume as noise , and rock volume as power as suggested by Waksman, Despite the clear sense of extreme, deafening volume and a parenthetical suggestion that the band themselves wear earplugs, this is one of the few pieces that is unequivocal in its reproduction of loud-as-good discourse.

A friend from up there calls me and tells me how it went.

'Spinal Tap': 11/11/11 is Nigel Tufnel Day

High volume in the form of high sound pressure level SPL is ingrained in the aesthetics of many forms of popular music, most obviously in rock and its associated sub-genres, but also in many other genres and styles including various forms of dance music, hip hop, reggae and electronic music. The primary site of expression of the notion of loud-as-good is in the performance of music in public spaces or venues live, recorded or a blend of both. This essay identifies five discourses of loudness as they appear in music journalism, and in fiction. These are: loud-as-good, loud-as-bad; loud-as-good for the audience, but bad for the journalist; loud-as-good for the journalist, but bad for the audience; loud-as-irrational. Work elsewhere addresses the ways in which the human ear and brain perceive and process volume levels, and so underpin broader arguments about why loud-as-good might have become central to rock in particular Blesser, This article is however concerned with discourses of loudness as they appear in music journalism and selected other texts, and the extent to which these representations reflect, reinforce, or contradict orthodox rock ideology of loud-as-good.

Spinal Tap Band T-Shirts

This is Spinal Tap is widely regarded to be the first real mockumentary. One of the most memorable running gags in This is Spinal Tap is that the titular band has lost an inordinate number of drummers. When the band members are asked what happened to their first drummer, David St. This is a hilarious punchline for such a great build-up. It makes people weep instantly to play The musical growth rate of this band cannot even be charted. The band members are furious, since it was actually supposed to be 18 feet tall. Now, whether or not he knows the difference between feet and inches is not my problem.

Hello Cleveland! Nine embarrassing Spinal Tap moments that happened in real life

Nigel Tufnel: What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Marty DiBergi: Put the volume up to eleven. Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. One louder. Often, some people have the need to top things.

Robot or human?

The primary implication of the reference is one in which things that are essentially the same are seen as different, due to mislabeling or the user's misunderstanding of the underlying operating principles. A secondary reference may be anything being exploited to its utmost limits, or apparently exceeding them. In , the phrase entered the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary with the definition "up to maximum volume". In this scene, Nigel gives the rockumentary's director, Marty DiBergi, played by Rob Reiner , a tour of his stage equipment. While Nigel is showing Marty his Marshall guitar amplifiers , he points out a selection whose control knobs all have a highest setting of eleven, unlike standard amplifiers whose volume settings are typically numbered from 0 to

A brief history of cranking the volume up to 11 — and beyond

View Full Version : Spinal tap amps. We've got this on the way in another thread, but I think it is better to make a separate topic of it: The Spinal Tap amps. They went from 0 to But did they actually play louder or did they just have a different volume dial scale? They played louder. The Spinal Tap amps.

The Science of "Spinal Tap"

Read more: We put the portable and budget-friendly KitSound Diggit 55 speaker to the test. Marshall, a go-to name in professional-level sound, is superior regardless of an extra volume notch. Founded almost 60 years ago, its amps are some of the most recognisable in the world, the italicised Marshall name a sign of punchy sound and crunchy rock. Away from stadium-filling amps, Marshall also makes personal audio kits, channeling the same design ethics into each.

Look out Bose – How to turn your Andro packaging into DIY speakers

RELATED VIDEO: Spinal Tap - These Go To 11

Look, right across the board: 11, 11, Since then, the idea of turning things up to 11 has bled into pop culture. Whatever the case, around this time, we have countless other references to this same type of thing, generally associated with either patriotism or sports. For example, consider this excerpt from the June 16, edition of the Jackson Daily News out of Mississippi,. By now the is in open country and you look at the speedometer. The needle is hovering around 75 mph.

Nigel : The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and Martin: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten? Nigel : Exactly. Martin: Does that mean it's louder?

Etymology: From a scene in the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap in which a musician shows off his guitar amplifiers. The primary implication of the reference is one in which things that are essentially the same are seen as different, due to mislabeling or the user's misunderstanding of the underlying operating principles. A secondary reference may be anything being exploited to its utmost limits, or apparently exceeding them. In , the phrase entered the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary with the definition "up to maximum volume".