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It's Laughs all the Way with XTA on UK's Biggest Comedy Tour
The Lee Evans Big Tour is the UK's largest stand up comedy tour of 2008, with 59 sold out dates in arenas around the country and a total audience figure estimated at over 400,000. With such a vast number of people to keep amused, sound quality is a prime concern, so audio provider for the tour Capital Sound has developed a system that utilises XTA digital signal processing and ensures clarity and versatility at every single venue.
A total of 11 XTA DP226 are used to control an extensive Martin Audio line array system. "It's something we developed from Lee's 2005 XL tour, which in itself was a development from the Eddie Izzard system we'd used two years previously," says Capital Sound's Paul Timmins. "We now have a design for large-scale comedy which we think serves the range of venues on this current tour very well."
"We have all the delay XTAs in the rack as a master unit and we use that as a matrix to drive the other XTAs which are stage end, which runs straight off the multicore," explains audio crew chief Matt Harman-Trick. "It's all being controlled by a Moxa unit and we run everything from a graphics tablet so that we can wander round the room and make any the changes using XTA's AudioCore software."
As well as the considerable quota of DP226s, FOH engineer Phil Tame also uses an XTA SiDD as a compressor across Evans' vocal mic, which is Y split to allow for a song vocal and a speech vocal. "The SiDD wasn't originally meant to be on the tour," laughs Timmins. "Phil found it in the warehouse and now he likes it so much he won't give it back!"
"Our main concern for this tour is proximity," continues Harman-Trick. "Making it feel like the comedian is actually talking to you rather than him being a little bloke on the stage miles away. Every member of the audience needs to feel close to Lee, which would be impossible without the delay system as some are over 100m away. But we are able to move the sound image closer to them, and is the reason why we've added so many delays to the system."
The necessity for proximity is a requirement that is emphasised by Mark Harris, Production Manger for the tour.
"This is very important with the spoken word and, in addition, this is comedy, so people have got to hear the joke," he says. "If they don't hear the punch line, they might as well not be here."
Harris knows how important it is to get the right companies on board to achieve this. With the audio, his decision was fairly straight forward as he had worked with Capital Sound on Evans' 2005 XL tour.
"We designed that system to work for the spoken word in some very unfriendly spaces and it coped brilliantly, achieving everything we wanted," continues Harris. "We've tweaked that design a bit this time and used a few slightly different things. We're still trying to achieve the same thing, but we've paid a lot more attention to making sure that the sound is absolutely right in every single seat in the house."
"Using the XTA units makes it easy to make changes if we decided we need to do something different," adds Harman-Trick. "We're going from here [the O2] to the Brighton Centre, which is smaller than the floor space here and has a tiny little balcony, and on to the NIA, so it's quite a diverse range of venues and we're adapting the system for different each one. With the XTAs, we can load in a new set of pre sets very quickly, which works really well for us."
And how is the system coping so far? Harris sums up: "We're 20 odd dates in and it's doing exactly what we want in every venue!"
In picture: The Lee Evans sound crew.
21st October 2008
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