| Brooks and Dunn’s
Neon Circus in Vegas
By Chris Kathman
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Brooks and Dunn FOH
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They call it the Brooks and Dunn Neon Circus, and there is indeed tons o’neon,
as well as Dwight Yoakam, Chris Cagle, and other bands, two big arrays of Sound
Image composite speakers flying in the air, and a total of fourteen consoles:
nine belonging to the bands, plus five more rented from Sound
Image. | Then there are the countless mundane tasks,
like subsnakes that need to be unpatched, as well as channel after channel of
RF that needs to be turned off, when the band they are used for isn’t onstage. Yeah,
country shows have changed just a little bit. There is also a performer who appears
right before Brooks and Dunn, that they call Daniel the Rubber
Boy. |
Tommy
Welch & scooter
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I scoffed when he was about to go on, thinking he was just some mainstream
contortionist. After all, I‘ve worked with The Torture
King! Not to mention the certifiably crazy people of the Jim
Rose Circus, such as Mr.
Lifto. How could this impress me? Well, Brooks and Dunn’s FOH
mixer Tommy Welch turned around from his Midas XL-4 and had a good laugh as I
started shouting, covered my eyes, and literally ran out the back of the mix position,
when the Rubber Boy casually reached up, dislocated his arm, and wrapped it around
his neck. It just looked WRONG! | Tommy is a humorist in
his daily life, too, the cow “skull” on the right side of his console
actually is the signal light for Clear-Com calls from the stage. Like many other
arena mixers and crew, Tommy enjoys riding one of those ubiquitous electric scooters
around. I tried one recently, and found out what all the fuss is about, you can
go really fast on them!
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Sound Image array
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Sound Image crew chief Pete McDonough showed me around the dual monitor worlds
stage left and right. There are two distros, two snakes, and for Brooks and Dunn,
a total of 43 wireless channels, once you add all the units sending from the stage,
and in-ear mixes transmitting towards it. “This is as clean as it gets,”
Pete told me, adding that, once you get past the drums, there are only six mics
live on stage for the Brooks and Dunn set. Their AKG
420 headsets are picked up by AKG 900 receivers, originally made for the Japanese
market. Their monitor mixer Hud (Dave Hudnell) sends their in-ear mixes out on
a set of Sennheiser
300 transmitters. |
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Pete
McDonough of Sound Image
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The crews only do a basic line check in the afternoon, with techs playing the
instruments, and save their energy for the five-minute set changes every night.
The methodology of doing those includes unlatching input snakes from fan-outs
on one desk and onto another, while instrument techs and stagehands race around
the stage, bringing new gear into place. |
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