Empire of the Sun is wrapping up a world tour that saw the Australian electronic music act – a duo is composed of Luke Steele of The Sleepy Jackson and Nick Littlemore of Pnau – utilizing a wide range of Radial Engineering products in its tour kit.
The band’s manager, Pete Lusty has long been using Radial JDIs – both single and duplex, as well as J48s, JS-3s, and a Tonebone Classic Tube Overdrive. “
The JS-3 being entirely neutral sounding is exactly what you want in a split,” Lusty notes. “The JDIs and J48s handle their individual tasks with ease, and on the occasions we’ve held a comparison test with alternate products the difference is outstanding, we’re amazed anyone uses another box, when you hear these you’ll know what we mean – it’s as if the wool has been pulled from over our eyes (or ears for that matter).”
“One technique we use that may differ from ‘the norm’ is that of our Vocal Distortion chain,” he continues. “We split the vocal via the JS-3 sending one signal direct to the system, then another is fed into the Classic Tube Overdrive that crunches the signal up wonderfully adding just the right amount of harmonics without making things sound very top heavy or harsh, we get a good solid crunch that really places itself well in the mix.
“After the Overdrive we pass through a J-48 to bring things back to microphone level and again feed into the system. The whole operation happens without ever a problem and phase alignment is maintained throughout, a feature I can say is not that case on some other products out there making fitting things into the mix a challenge at times. Given the effectiveness and simplicity of operation of this implementation, many other engineers and bands we meet along the way have drawn inspiration from this design – us having been around the world and back trying to find it in the first place has shown that there really only is one way to do it, and Radial is the way.”
Empire’s highly theatrical show relies on the impeccable performance of every piece of equipment. Radial’s SW8 (8-channel auto-switcher), designed primarily for live concerts and stage shows where backing tracks are used for orchestration and backing vocals, is a fixture.
According to Lusty, “We find the SW-8 to be an exceptional unit, though we don’t use the auto switching feature itself we do use every other element to it’s full extent. It’s a rock solid unit, amazingly compact considering what it offers and sounds great. Simple things like the layout of the connectors and screen printing of labels has obviously been thought about with everything quickly becoming second nature. Use of, somewhat now industry standard, D-Sub connectors allows quick and easy patching and a clean look in the rack, again whoever thought of printing the D-Sub Pin Out on the unit has made life so much easier to troubleshoot non-standard D-Subs that occasionally crop up. We also happen to like the colour blue on the unit.”
New to this tour is the addition of the SGI Guitar Interface, Pro-RMP and a JDX. “For those of you who run wireless systems – or any time you need a long cable run for a passive instrument (or active even), these items are a God send,” Lusty says. “The SGI on paper only seems to perform a simple task, in practice it is so much more. The Drag loading brings the instrument back into the picture as if the amplifier was right next to it with only a 6-inch cable (it also opens up many tonal possibilities that you may not otherwise discover – I think I’ll be getting a bunch of Dragster Load Correctors in the future) and any idea of ground looping is effortlessly corrected.
“We’ve not delved too far into the land of the JDX yet, but first impressions have blown our old Red-Box out of the water, we did recently move away from this technique of capturing guitar live, but when we return to it, we have the right box in hand. The Pro RMP, does exactly what it says on the tin, effortless to use, sounds great – a real life saver and problem solver, I’ll forever carry one.”
“Overall our working with Radial has really lifted many elements of our production, we will never go back to the way it was before – it has really changed our lives for the better.”
