latest news headlines
D1 and D2 Make Wainwright Tour Sound Smooth
Canadian-born singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright has a distinctive style of theatrical pop that has won him awards in his home country and created a following not just on home ground, but around the world. His recent four week European tour took him to a variety of venues, not all of which had the most up to date audio systems that Wainwright’s front of house engineer, Matt Manasse, could have wished for.
“Some venues were better than others,” explains Manasse. “We played everything from nasty night clubs to beautiful concert halls and theatres, so we had to rely on local racks and stacks for the shows in continental Europe. It would have been really difficult to carry enough PA to cover such a variety of venues. And at this point it’s just not cost effective.
“The DiGiCo D1 really helps where you don’t have a consistent system. The output stage has got insertable processing channels (IPCs), so I could tune any system and time align it without having to carry extensive outboard. It’s a very powerful tool. You can make some horrible places sound great.
“We had an Adamson Y10 line array for the UK dates with XTA DP226s running the system, which made an enormous difference.”
Manasse ran what was originally his local rack on stage with a DiGiCo MiniRack at front of house. “I have an XTA D2 over Wainwright’s vocals to eliminate unwanted peaks in his voice. I use the D2 rather than the console for this because I want to compress or limit more than one frequency at a time, and I find it easier to do it with an external unit. Other than that, I am using only the console’s internal effects, four reverbs and the tap delay. It’s really easy and it sounds great.”
The D1’s snapshots feature was used extensively between the support band and Wainwright, with Manasse performing a simple digital repatch. By sharing some of the cables on stage, he had to do nothing more than put a different mic on the end of a cable to give the opening act’s engineer his own channels to play with, which Manasse found to be an easy and quick solution. “I only have 56 forward/multicore lines, but we’re using over 80 ‘channels’ by the time I’ve got the support band up and running.
“I’m mixing on multiple layers. I learnt very quickly that it would make sense to develop a logical system in the way that I lay the desk out. I try to use the same channel ‘banks’ for the same things so that no matter which act I’m mixing, I know exactly where the vocals or guitar will be without having to hunt around. It’s quite instinctive now. It’s become a very natural way of working. I can’t believe that I’ll ever chose to tour with any other console. I’ve got my D1 fully expanded because I want it to be as compatible with the DiGiCo D5 as possible and I can quickly swap and update sessions between them.”
System technician Aaron Ross is in charge of the XTA DP226s, which he uses as simple crossovers for the system, controlled by XTA’s new AudioCore 8 software via a wireless tablet,” he explains. “I’m using one DP226 as a master at Front of House. I like having the rest of the crossovers in the amp racks because it means I can have as many zones as I want. One day I can have a rig set up as left/right flown, left/right on the ground with in fills and out fills, and then next day have just left and right and there’s no repatching involved. Just a little bit of work in AudioCore and you’re done. And it’s very accurate.”
The configuration of these XTA DP226s is slightly unusual. “We’ve got lots of XTAs in different racks that are all linked,” says Manasse. “The 485data links all the units together, and then we bring the data output of the last unit back to the input of the first unit making a continuous loop (something I pioneered at the McCartney concert in Red Square). All in all, this seems to be about as foolproof and easy to use a system as you can get.”
11th January 2006
HEADLINES
news archive
search stories
FOOTNOTE: Select the news type you require in the red band above; this will enable you to see the current news stories from that section
© 1999 - 2012 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories
