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Give It A Name – Nexo calls it NXStream
The three days of the Give It A Name indoor shows are seen as the start of the UK festival season – as the best up-and-coming new alt-rock bands flip-flop through three venues in England and Scotland. With up to 12 acts a day going through each stage, this was a great opportunity for an army of different front-of-house engineers to get their hands on a big NEXO GEO T line array, running the newly-launched NXStream management software.
Give It a Name began in 2005 and soon became established as the biggest indoor rock festival in the UK. This year it has expanded – beginning in Germany at venues in Berlin and Cologne, followed by Paris, before heading to the British Isles where it played in England and Scotland. A weekend crowd of more than 25,000 came to Earls Court alone for a bill dominated by pop-punk and emo bands like H.I.M from Finland, Brand New and Juliette & The Licks from the USA, and Enter Shikari from the UK.
SSE Audio Group supplied three identical systems for the weekend-long event, with crews going to Earls Court London, the NIA Birmingham and the SECC Glasgow. Each system comprised left/right hangs of 23 Nexo GEO T4805 plus three GEO T2815s, with a centre cluster of five GEO T cabinets, and 12 CD18s each side. At a pair of Midas Heritage 3000s out front, the crews were working to five-minute changeovers.
On behalf of SSE in London, seasoned engineers Alex Hall and Matthew Kettle were on hand to babysit and to mix a few bands themselves. Matt Kettle has made extensive use of Nexo’s flagship tangent array system on several tours with The White Stripes, so he offers an expert opinion on the new revitalised GEO T system.
“Personally, I was extremely impressed. I always find it easy to mix on GEO T, and frankly I am surprised that Nexo has found a way to improve it! With the new software, the high end of the GEO T sounds even better than it was before, you can hear lots of headroom, and I was really pleased by the way the system and the subs sat together.”
For some of the engineers, mixing for relatively new bands, this was the first chance they’d had to mix on a full-size festival system. Says Kettle: “It’s quite funny to watch people mix for the first time on a transparent line array. It just gets louder as they turn it up, expecting it to distort, and it never happens! We kept the system at 104dBA (at FOH) most of the time, and the majority of engineers appeared quite comfortable mixing at that level; it’s a good sign when rock engineers are happy with that. We were able to hang nice long lines of GEO T, which is when line arrays sound best; you get more coverage without having to work the cabinets too hard.” All systems were powered by Camco’s Vortex 6 amplifiers.
Mixing front-of-house for Enter Shikari, the much-hyped band leading the British hardcore revolution, engineer Andy Russell seems to agree. “I really liked the clarity and intelligibility of the mix, and that I didn’t have to hack the graphic at all. SSE had set the rigs up really well and the systems sounded great.”
Brad Divens, long-time user of GEO T as FOH engineer for Linkin’ Park, was working with Finnish headliners H.I.M. at the G.I.A.N. events. He said: “I first mixed on GEO T in spring 2003, and it seemed to be missing something. Now it sounds great, aggressive and in your face; it’s a very responsive, powerful and complete system.”
22nd May 2007
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