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ADLIB Supplies Sound and Lighting for John Barrowman Tour
ADLIB supplied sound and lighting equipment and crew to the recent John Barrowman UK tour.
FOH sound engineer Walter Jaquiss (whose current clients include the Sex Pistols) has worked with ADLIB on many previous occasions and comments, "As soon as I knew ADLIB was providing the production, I knew that everything would run like clockwork." He worked closely with ADLIB's systems engineers James Neale (FOH) and Ben Booker (monitors) on this tour.
Jaquiss chose L-Acoustics dvDOSC for the left and right arrays, 12 mid-high boxes a side, along with four dvSUBS and eight of the new L-Acoustics SB28 subs, all of which were ground stacked, and they used eight ARCS cabinets for infill.
"It sounded superb," says Jaquiss, "It was the perfect system for the largely cabaret style show," which was playing primarily concert hall and theatre venues. He explains that he wanted a clean, smooth sound with minimal colouration to deal with Barrowman's wide repertoire of songs that covered a huge range during the two-and-a-half hour performance.
They took two Soundcraft Vi6 consoles, used for both FOH and monitors. They needed consoles with plenty of power and inputs, which also had a relatively small footprint and to keep the truck pack expedient. It was the first time Jaquiss had used a Vi6 on tour, so he took it out on another ADLIB gig beforehand, and found it was extremely easy to learn and use. "It's a good sounding desk," he comments. "It's designed to be user-friendly an not over-complicated."
He used all 64 inputs, while at the other end of the multicore, Ben Booker was running 31 monitor mixes by the end of the tour. They used no external effects at FOH or monitors, with the console's eight in-built Lexicon reverbs proving a great asset for the show.
They ran a standard ADLIB drive rack for processing and EQ with Lake DLPs and a wireless tablet controlling the whole system. It was powered by Camco LA8 amps, with the standard VDOSC presets.
On monitors, Ben Booker used a combination of ADLIB MP3 wedges and in-ear mixes for the seven band members and Barrowman. In rehearsals, they were all offered the choice between the two monitoring options, and initially Barrowman went out with three pairs of wedges to cover his different singing areas. However during the course of the tour, he was converted from using the wedges to relying on his Ultimate Ears IEMs, which tidied up the stage considerably.
They ran eight channels of Sennheiser G2 IEMs, and a selection of Shure hard-wired packs, ADLIB's own U4 radio system and a full complement of other mics including Sennheiser, AKG and Barrowman's singing mic - a Shure KSM radio.
Lighting was designed by Dave Hill and operated/directed on the road by Neil Trenell, working with ADLIB Lighting's Andy Rowe and Stuart Gray. The fixtures were rigged over three trusses - front, mid and back.
The back truss featured three Martin Professional MAC 700 Washes and four MAC 700 Profiles, two Martin Atomic strobes and a 40ft starcloth backdrop. The mid truss featured four MAC 700 Washes and four MAC 700 profiles, plus two Atomics, and the front truss had seven 10 degree Source Four profiles for key lighting, two MAC 700 Profiles and four MAC 700 Washes and five 2-lite Moles.
On the deck were eight of the new Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300s, which are similar to a moving ACL fixture. Upstage centre was a 5k Fresnel, used for silhouetting, and ADLIB also supplied two Lycian 1.2k followspots.
Trenell ran all this from a Hog iPC console. The rig was "extremely well designed and thought-out to fit the venues and the show perfectly," comments Andy Rowe, adding that everything went extremely smoothly, including the traditional ADLIB lighting/sound camaraderie.
In picture: the crew - R Neil Trenell (LD) , Walter Jaquiss (FOH sound), James Neale (PA Tech) , Andy Rowe (Lighting Tech) and Stuart Gray (Lighting Tech).
16th May 2008
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