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InnovaSON Scores Double Whammy on Wet Wet Wet Tour
Eighties legends Wet Wet Wet embarked on an arena tour of the UK in December, culminating in two of the last-ever dates at Wembley Arena, with a pair of InnovaSON Sy80 digital mixing consoles on front of house and monitor duty respectively.
Both front of house engineer Tom Wiggans and monitor engineer Chris Trimby are experienced InnovaSON users. Wiggans has used the boards extensively on UB40’s world tours, while Trimby uses an Sy80 on a weekly basis at Top of the Pops for mixing the audience PA and providing artist foldback.
Trimby has picked up two awards in recent years for his work as a monitor engineer – in both cases while mixing on InnovaSON boards. He was nominated Monitor Engineer of the Year at the 2004 Total Production Awards for his work on the David Gray tour, and also won an Emmy Award for his part in mixing U2 and Sting for a phoneathon for Fox Television to raise money for victims of 9/11.
“The Sy80 is a very powerful machine, it sounds great, and is the only console I will use now, given the choice,” he says. “The fact that you can pan individual channels and also pan within a group is incredible - no other console does that.
“I’m working with 48 input channels, and the band is very easy to mix as the material is well written, with lots of spaces within the music. I’ve worked with many bands that use loops as well as drums and that can get tricky, but with Wet Wet Wet the only samples we have are some strings and a small piece of percussion. I’m using the Sy80’s onboard EQ and dynamics – in fact the only things external to desk are three reverb machines.”
The band all use wedge monitors, apart from some in-ears for the brass section and one for lead singer Marty Pellow.
At front of house, Wiggans is dealing with around 48 input channels from the band plus some effects returns. “It’s really a classic rock show – they’re mainly playing everything live,” he says. “The onboard dynamics of the Sy80 are great and the automation is remarkably straightforward. During the production rehearsals I was able to use the first few run throughs to concentrate on setting up the gain structure, input EQ and dynamics. Once I’m happy it’s easy to use the basic page as a template to create specific pages for each song.
“From that point on it’s just a case of fine-tuning the mixes for each song. If any input changes drastically it takes seconds to make global changes using the InnovoSON’s Overram function which allows me to copy parameter changes to all the pages in RAM without having to modify each page individually.
“I also use the midi automation on the Sy80 to change effects programs on key outboard units. A very useful feature is that all the program changes appear in a single window so that if a new song gets added it’s easy to see exactly what is going on!”
19th January 2005
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