Summer Music Festivals

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Seeing this live would be... nice.

[Teeth]

Listening to it in the best possible conditions is appreciating music.

Guess the opinions differ about what the best possible conditions are for listening music. I think listening to a band produce their music live and blasting it through high class equipment are the best possible conditions, granted open air festival performances are not the best conditions compared to small venue performances.

Very few bands are good on stage. But people who visit live performances (in the open space) are usually wasted, so they don't mind.

Depends on your selection of bands, I find that most of the bands I really listen to are just quality musicians who can produce similar quality live.

[Son Of Odin]

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I disagree. I think you can have great studio bands who produce amazing albums but really aren't all that fantastic live. But then you have bands who produce average studio albums but when you see them live they blow you away. Neither is preferable as they both have their merits.

There are some bands who I now never listen to their studio albums because they were simply too good live. Like Muse for example. I always buy their albums but their live performance just blows those away. Another I was very surprised by was Maroon 5. I took a girlfriend to see them thinking in my eyes they'd be appalling. They now rate as the second best (after muse) band I've ever seen. Their stage presence and skill on instruments was amazing. But then there are bands like Paramore. They do an ok live show. But their studio album is always much better. The same goes with Pendulum. They kicked ass live but I still prefer listening to their album. But there's nothing wrong with that at all as it takes a different kind of skill.

I definitely agree on the smaller venues though. Some of the best gigs I've been to were at my local arena with Enter Shikari who are a local band for me. 200 people in a small town arena. Nothing really beats it. Even on a different scale, I much preferred Muse when they played Wembley arena. When they moved to the Stadium the sound quality dramatically dropped (as with most open air music events), although the scale increased of course.

Yeh true, playing live is a bit different kind of skillset compared to studio recording. I just still disagree. There is not that many bands out there who are fucking horrible live and make good records (which I could possible think myself listening to). To me it's a test of real musician to perform live. Then you can see the music isn't just some protools shit made by their godly producer. Even a monkey with half a hand can make something sound somewhat decent with modern recording technology and enough money to buy a producer who jerks off to autotune sounds. I just don't appreciate bands that don't deliver on the stage. They don't need to be mind blowing or super awesome every time. Just have to have some balls to do it and get really good at it over time.