The Eddie Izzard Remix Tour Live, which saw the performer celebrating 35 years of comedy in a disparate collection of venues and halls ranging from 2,200-capacity down to 840, was supported by sound reinforcement by Solotech UK with a system headed by Martin Audio WPS line arrays and supporting components.
“The last Eddie Izzard tour [Wunderbar, in 2019] was part of the reasons I bought WPS in the first place,” explains Solotech senior account manager Robin Conway. “This time around production and I wanted to try and provide the same level of consistency while retaining a single truck.”
The sound design was reworked from venue to venue by the team of sound engineer Scott (Scoobie) Scherban and system tech Rayne Ramsden working alongside production manager Stephen Reeve. The production carried 24 WPS elements to enable 12-per-side elements to be flown at the largest venue, Birmingham Symphony Hall (2,200-cap), as well as four SX218, half a dozen DD6 (generally as frontfills) and a pair of XD12 for various balcony delays or sidefills. This scaled down to a pair of WPS a side ground stacked on a single SX218 at bijou theatres such as the Brighton Theatre Royal and Richmond Theatre.
The rig, in whatever configuration, was driven in the optimum 1-box resolution from Martin Audio iKON multi-channel amplifiers. Elsewhere, in Glasgow the team had a stacked six-a-side WPS on a single SX218, while in Cardiff they reverted to a vertical SX218 with four WPS stacked on top, presenting the potential problem of obscured sightlines.
Scherban cites one venue in particular that only permitted a single sub with four WPS stacked on top. “It did an incredible job,” he says. “To be able to ground stack like that and manage to cover three balconies up is pure genius.”
He faced the additional challenge of contending with an assortment of mic gymnastics (bordering on abuse) as Izzard worked through trademark classic skits. He approached it as a “hybrid rock / theatre show,” explaining … “the thunder and lightning effects make the opening surprisingly big and bold … and so it has to be loud.”
Vocal simulations range from the Darth Vader [Canteen of the Death Star] sketch where she’s cupping the mic, to capturing her imitating dinosaurs eating, notes Scherban. “There is a lot of mumbling, and the challenge is to capture the sound from the most subtle level right the way through to absolute scream. The gain on the microphone is huge.” Two separate preamps were assigned to the mic—one dedicated to speech, the other for her effects channel to get the level up sufficiently.
Ramsden also highlighted the challenges of deploying different stacked PA configs in venues without hanging points or low weight bearing capacity. In addition, getting a single mic to travel with power and clarity into the deepest recesses of small venue was one of his prime concerns. ”Having the one-box resolution was really useful in being able to move the audio within the space”, he says. But he also needed to minimize the sound coming back off the box that the mic would inevitably pick up “and make sure it is as limited as possible.”
He employed Martin Audio DISPLAY 2 software to optimize the sound: “It’s much quicker to get a 2D CAD slice out than to draw the whole venue particularly when you don’t have pre-given calculations.” He has also made use of the Hard Avoid feature in DISPLAY. “There’s been a lot of usage of that onstage,” he admits, “to avoid the rear side of the box. Also, some of the venues had a tiered roof that I had to make sure I didn’t hit.
Having worked with WPS now in several different modes and deployments, he concludes, “The great thing about WPS is that it’s a big sounding box in a small format, which helped keep the sightlines as clear as possible. You can use it anywhere, as a nice complement to WPL as delays or side hangs.”
