Last night I
went to see Pentatonix (PTX for short) concert at the Paramount Theater. I haven’t been to a concert in forever and
the one I usually attended are rock concerts.
But I like PTX from their YouTube channel and my man thought it would be
interesting to see who they perform live.
The band
originates from choir and added base vocals and beat boxer to forum a more
harmonic a cappella group. There voices
are lovely and each one of them has such a huge vocal range. Here is where it gets messy, in the opening
song “Daft Punk” (which is one of my favorites by the way) they sounded like a
jumbled mess. The tenors and sopranos
over whelmed the bass muddling up. To top
it off there was very little choreography and felt like we were attending a
high school choir concert with lights constantly blinding us. It wasn’t until after there first act when
they brought out their beat boxer to play on his cello while beat boxing. It was beautiful song he played/sung and it
really wanted me to get up and do a sensual dance with my man. You can watch
the cello beat box here:
After the cello beat box the concert turned
around and was so much better. There was
less vocal fighting and each vocal range shined at the proper moments.
What this concert
really needed was a live sound mixer. They
really needed him in the first half of the concert, but threw out a really good
sound mixer will help balance out the vocals and create more dynamic range in
each song. If you compare a local band
concert to a professional stadium concert you know the pro’s sound quality is
ten times that of the locals. This is
not to say the locals music is bad but I am comparing to the over all sound
quality of the instruments and the vocals.
In the Pro’s the vocals can be heard loud and clear and the instruments
are not muddling together. Compare that
to a group that does not have a live mixer and the instrument start to muddle
together and you can’t really hear the vocals unless they shout into the microphone.
A few tweaks
from a sound mixer during this concert would have helped with the muddling
problem. Aside from the vocals, visuals
would have helped significantly. Simple blocking
and a bit of dancing from the artists would have been more entertaining. Even something as simple as a costume change
would have shake things up. I go to concerts not only to listen to the
music but to be visually stimulated as well.
A little choreography goes a long way.
I still
really like this group and they are a very talented young bunch of kids. What they are lacking is stage performance and
grandeur. With a few tweaks to their
performance and a sound mixer off stage, this can be a worth while concert to
attend. Check out PTX for your self at
their site PTX Official.
See you on
the other side
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