Carrying no outboard effects at all, McDonald turns to his board for all processing, calling upon the power of a variety of plug-ins – or audio modules as Allen & Heath prefers to call them.
For Adele’s vocals, plug-ins replicating the sound of vintage ENT plates are his choice, along with delays and a host of reverbs.
Clever Things
“There are a lot of things going on onstage, so I like to create a number of different textures to properly express them,” McDonald explains.
“There are great de-essers on the board I use on the backing vocalists. There are also a number of clever little features you can’t find on anything else.
“Among them is a real-time analyzer that lets me physically see, for example, precisely how the de-essers are cutting into the vocals, or exactly how the gates on the kick drum are behaving.”
An extensive range of microphones from Sennheiser form the backbone of the show’s input list.
The scheme is, according to McDonald, “A personal choice really, we use all Sennheiser kit onstage.”
For Adele, McDonald reached into the Sennheiser catalog and chose a wireless SKM 2000 system with an SKM 500-965 G3 transmitter.
“Her voice has a really nice midrange,” he says, “it’s smoky – smoky rich and R&B straight from the ‘60s.
“Then the high-end is super-cutting. It’s like a much older voice than her actual years, and this mic is perfect for it. It pushes, really projects. I love Neumann 105s, but they are a bit too sparkly on top for this task.”
Backing vocals are managed with hard-wired Sennheiser e 935s, while the drum kit starts on the top at overheads with Sennheiser e 906s, moves down to e 903s on snare, e 904s on toms, and an e 901 and e 902 jointly residing in the kick.
Acoustic guitars rely upon Avalon DIs, and for what McDonald calls a “gag piano” (a lacquered upright that looks like a traditional upright but actually houses a pair of Yamaha electric Motif keyboards), Radial J48 DIs provide the feed.