Uncle Wally, kids!

Jeff Waluch had a good attitude when he went out on the “Hollyweird” 2002 summer tour, a package that included the band he mixed and tour managed, Winger, along with Poison, Cinderella and Faster Pussycat. Just give him some “good boxes and power, preamps that don’t roar, and we got a rock show!” The tour carried its own sound system, from Electrotec, that included 32 EAW KF850 tops and 12 EAW SB1000 subs, running off an aux. EFX were shared by the four mixers, and included an SDE 3000, H3000, TC M5000, TC 2290, and a Lexicon 480L with a LARC controller.

Effects were returned to a Yamaha 02R submixer, and showed up on the band boards as a stereo pair.

Four BSS Omnidrives controlled the mains, the subs, and the
Meyer UPA frontfills, which the tour carried, as well as the lawn fills
provided by sheds that they visited. Each band mixer has full access
to system power, and shared pairs of Yamaha 4K’s at the house and monitor positions. Laurie Quigley was mixing Cinderella, using the dbx 120 “boom box,”
or subharmonic synthesizer.

Neumann head

Winger tour EFX

Laurie also set up a Neumann binaural dummy head, which Jeff sometimes also used, to record to his PC, using the M Audio Interface. He explained that this offers two mic pre’s, two line inputs, and a USB out. Jeff was doing real time recordings of the Winger 45 minute sets using Sound Forge, which he would then normalize, and could add titles, erase things, or apply noise reduction.

After burning one, and only one, CD for bandleader Kip Winger, “Wally” would then purge the file and therefore not fill up his disk space. He uses Sony Digital Music Maker on his laptop and has a 40 gig hard drive.

There was one anomaly in the EFX rack, which is that the Yamaha Rev 500 (Wally used this on Winger headlining dates) is pin three hot, while all other Yamaha units are pin two. When Winger crew member Pete Cotutsca built a 16 pair fan-out for Wally, he merely flipped the polarity on the set that went to the Rev 500. The 02R submixer has a patch bay that linked the two 4K’s it was sending to.

Comps/gates/EQ’s – Hollyweird dynamics

Classic 12AM’s

Eventually Wally plans to start using the new 8x8 cue changing device from Midiman. This box uses driver software from the different manufacturers, to offer you remote control over various parameters, from a set of generic “soft” knobs. Pretty handy at a mix position where the rack is down yonder past the other console at the position, way out of arm’s reach.

Kip Winger sings through a prototype Shure headphone that Wally describes as “low profile, high intelligibility.” He added that “what’s really impressive is its background cancellation, very slick.” And, indeed, when I listened to the show, Winger’s voice went from a baritone to a tenor, all very clearly, one of the best sounding headsets I have ever heard.

Yes, it seems that “big hair” metal never died, it just went into hibernation. As a veteran of many gigs, both mixing bands, and working for sound companies such as MSI, Wally knows how to work a room, deliver uninterrupted vocal intelligibility, and use the power in a given system wisely. I would say that Mr. Winger made a smart choice hiring Mr. Waluch, judging from the very tight mix that I heard the night of my visit to “Hollyweird.”