Cheap Trick: Touring With Abandon

Keeping It Simple
Twenty-six inputs arrive at the FOH console from the stage. “Cheap Trick has long been referred to as one of the progenitors of power pop,” Kozy says. “In my estimation, that’s a fairly accurate description of who they are. I’m working with clear vocals, economical arrangements, and prominent guitar riffs.

“Everyone onstage still sounds amazing, it’s straight ahead, and the songs are great. On a base level here, you can’t fail if you simply remember to just not screw that up.”

His mix starts with big, clean drums, generally snare-up. While that isn’t always the way things work with newer bands, with these songs it tends to be just fine. The operative strategy is to keep things clean and separate, with the vocal on top.

“There are a handful of plugins I go to regularly from my Waves bundle and use judiciously here-and-there,” he reveals. “I use a C6 multiband compressor on Robin’s vocals to nail things down that might get a little woofy on the low-end, or too harsh in the mid-highs. It just opens things up and insures that he remains sounding as great as he is.”

Going down Kozy’s list of plug-in favorites, next you’ll find an L2 Ultramaximizer and an SSL G-Master Buss Compressor, both of which are on his mains and used very subtly to “just like in the studio, push everything forward as needed all at once without making a mess.” For parallel compression on drums, there’s a PuigChild, Waves’ modeling of a classic Fairchild.

MaxxVolume is used on Zander’s vocals in a configuration with a pair of thresholds: One for softer passages and another for louder ones that both bring up the sibilant content and make things more personal. An SSL G-Channel Strip with gated compression is on toms.

The 1968 Orange London 50W combo 212 at left was purchased by Nielsen on one of his first trips to the UK. The checkerboard wall of light and sound at right features a pair of 12-inch Celestion Vintage 30s miked with a Shure SM7 (inset).

He doesn’t use any automation at all, preferring instead to rely upon his own experience and grey matter to orchestrate mixing events for the 200 songs the band may pull from on any given night. Effects are spare as well, limited to essentially a bare minimum of reverb, slapback delay on numbers like “California Man,” and a slight delay just underneath to make things sound bigger.

“The set list will always contain the core songs,” he says. “But from there you never can tell what will happen from night to night. There are benefits to my taking a hands on approach. Sometimes it works to pull the guitars down and let the vocal take over, mostly in the verses, on tunes like ‘Top of the World’ and ‘I Can’t Take It.’ ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ on the other hand, is a good example of a song where everything’s big at the same time.

“Like my friend, longtime monitor mixer for Motorhead Ian ‘Eagle’ Dobbie says: ‘Everything louder than everything else’. When I’m faced with a strict dB cap, ‘Auf
Wiedersehen’ is the song that’s the most challenging. These are all elements that make Cheap Trick what it is. No one can change that, and shouldn’t.”

Monitor engineer Steve Funke at the helm of a Yamaha PM5D. “When it comes to digital,” he says, “this is the one for frontman Robin Zander.”

Happenings On Stage
Kozy’s cohort onstage handling monitors is Steve Funke. Working from behind a Yamaha PM5D, he takes a similar straightforward approach, eschewing automation and avoiding the use of effects and compression entirely.

Inputs arriving at the PM5D number 29, including a guest guitar channel plus FOH talkback; there are 16 outs for a mix of wedges and side fills, a pair of stereo in-ear mixes for the crew, and one guest in-ear mix.

Zander’s vocal microphone is a wireless Shure UR4S unit with a BETA 58A capsule, while the rest of the vocal positions use BETA 57As. Other input items of note include a drum kit miked at overheads with Shure large-diaphragm Shure KSM32s, an SM81 at hi-hat, SM98s on toms and more BETA 57As on snare.

Down on the kick drum, the standard BETA 52/SM91 combo you’d expect has been usurped by an SM57 and KSM137 that are taped together and mounted in front of the head so that both microphones’ diaphragms are aligned.

A homemade dual-element mic made by taping a Shure SM57 and KSM137 together captures the kick drum.

“Our previous monitor guy came up with the idea,” Kozy explains, “after Paul Owen of Metallica fame from Thunder Audio loaned us a dual-element Audio-Technica mic one day. We tried it at kick and it worked, so after we gave the mic back we just figured out a way to Frankenstein a similar version using our existing Shure stuff.

“We found that if you get far enough away from the beater head you’d still have body, but you wouldn’t get the back-pressure from the front head that could potentially cause problems. Once we found the sweet spot, it worked well for everyone.”

The only musician onstage fully on in-ears, Zander is equipped with a Sennheiser EM 2050 beltpack receiver and uses JH5 earbuds from JH Audio. Nielsen prefers to stick with just one JH Audio JH7 in his left ear, fed by a Shure PSM 1000 personal monitoring system. Electro-Voice Xw15s are Funke’s favorite choice for wedges, who adds that he can “get just about anything to work” for stage fills.

Future Looks Bright
Along with the band, the instruments, guitar cabinets, and amp heads seen and heard on the Cheap Trick stage probably deserve to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center this April 8.

“We’re too dumb to quit,” Nielsen was overheard saying not long after learning that the foursome will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year.

In late January, the band announced the release of its first album in five years, Bang Zoom Crazy…Hello. Slated for availability on April Fool’s Day, the album contains “No Direction Home,” a single that debuted along with the announcement in January. Live dates will return to the band’s schedule starting in early March in Florida and continue along the East Coast, through the Midwest, and into Canada before winding back down in late September in West Palm Beach, FL.

Gregory A. DeTogne is a writer and editor who has served the pro audio industry for the past 33 years.

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