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Midas Earns its Stripes
The UK leg of the White Stripes tour rolled out across the country in November, with the SSE Audio Group providing both FOH engineer Matthew Kettle and monitor engineer Neil Heal with their desk of choice – the Midas XL4 - as it has done for all European shows this year.
The White Stripes live show is a based around a theatrical blend of vintage equipment and instruments such as marimbas, timpani, push button bells, mandolin, grand piano, various keyboards and guitar rig which Jack moves between during his performance, while Meg works her way around the drum kit. In such a setting the analogue aesthetic of the XL4 is entirely suited to both the FOH and the onstage mix. Not only does the band not stick to a set list, they can play the same song on a different instrument on any given night.
"I keep a really functional mix, which is why I still use an analogue desk,” says Kettle. “It also suits the way I work because I don't use snapshots; as the show changes every night I have to react to what the artists are doing. And because there are so many instruments on stage I’ve used up all 48 channels on the XL4.”
Not only does Kettle prefer the XL4 for its sound quality, which he describes as “amazing”, but also because of the desk’s high quality mic preamps. These have proved particularly invaluable on this tour as some of the shows are being recorded.
“I’m using the pre-amp outputs for my multitrack recordings, and I can play them back into the same channels using the line inputs,” he says. “I can easily check recordings and have the capability to tweak the show mix if I ever feel the need.”
29th November 2005
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