James Mercer Quotes

When you're onstage with an electric band going through a massive P.A. system, it's very artificial. You can't really hear your own voice as it comes out of your mouth.

Any voice where you've got to scream over a battle or whatever, that's always difficult. It's harder than it seems.

We were gradually playing larger venues and in the early days PA systems were kind of non-existent. So to play loud, we had to use louder equipment. The PA systems back then didn't mic the instruments - only the vocals.

I play a percussion instrument, not a musical saw; it needs no amplification. Where it's needed, they put a microphone in front of the bass drum. But, I don't think it's necessary to play that way every night.

It's tricky, performing the show live. Because when you're in a big auditorium, in front of 700 people, the natural tendency is to want to talk louder. You want to project.

During a big rock show, you can flub a few things and nobody will hear it, because it gets buried under everything else.

Something that I think I figured out slowly was if you're playing a show and there's a chatter or there is, you know, a lot of noise - people talking or something - I was never the one whose instinct was to try to be louder than them.

We tune differently, and we use some tricks. There's just the two of us for much of a concert, so we want a big sound. We do use some guitar effects, distortion and delay. Playing cello with distortion sounds so good.

When you're in a club or a theater or even an arena, yeah, you want visuals, you want a good light show. But Slayer has always been about the sound. We have to sound good. It has to be tight.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

I have made stage adjustments which allow me to hear myself better onstage so that has made playing live much more enjoyable.

The complaint with me being on stage was always that I was slightly too naturalistic and not projecting enough. I've got quite a soft voice, so that didn't help.

The equipment you've got really dictates what you're going to do. When I started touring, there were no monitors, so I had to take the sound from the hall, and of course it was on a delay, so I would sing, and then I would hear it back, but later. It was very weird.

I love playing the Hard Rocks; they've got a great stage, great lighting, great sound, and not so humongous; its more intimate, so we love playing theaters and clubs where the audience has a really good chance to see and hear the group and where the acoustics are good. I like it when we can hear what we're doing.

To be honest, I think about the clubs when I write. But I should probably start thinking about stadiums, because the songs sound even better there - and bigger.

I blew amps like they were made of tissue paper. Once I blew out the sound system at Royal Albert Hall in London.

It's interesting to be a front person who is controlling the majority of the sound.

Singing for stage, if you don't hear yourself, that's when you push, and that's when you can hurt your voice sometimes. So if I can hear myself in my ear, it really helps me to find that balance of how loud I needed to be singing.

I play loud onstage for my own benefit as I like. But I'm not too fond of the P.A. either.

When you stand in a traditional audience, you have a wall of amplified sound coming at you from one direction. Everyone's familiar with that.

As much as only playing clubs can become tedious, performing in huge venues can also become off-putting. To go from one to the other feels great. And sometimes playing clubs can be even more stressful, because you really have to think about what you're going to tell the audience between songs.

I've always talked a lot on stage - I really wanted to communicate my ideas and when you're playing at a lot of shitty punk clubs they don't have good PAs and so no one knows what you're singing about.

I was on the dance floor but I couldn't hear the band.

I'd say it's harder to play with an acoustic guitar strapped over your shoulder for a few hundred people than it is to play in front of thousands with an entire bombastic band behind you.

Rock n' roll is a participatory sport.