The Australian band Jet is now touring America to support the group’s latest album, Shaka Rock.
At front of house is veteran mixer Kyle Chirnside, with Will Burston on monitors. the monitor desk.
They have chosen to carry their own front of house console, a Midas Pro6 live audio system supplied by Big Mo Pro in Parsippany, New Jersey for the entirety of the US tour.
“I’ve been using the Pro6 for two years now. It’s my console of choice,” said Chirnside.
“In fact, we did the first few shows on this tour without it, and I can tell you, it makes a huge difference.”
“With the digital snake system and on-board processing, the Pro6 really makes everything easier, and helps us get the most out the house rigs we encounter.”
Jet is also considering doing a live album, so all shows on the tour are being recorded. For that task, Chirnside selected the Klark Teknik DN9696 high resolution audio recorder.
“The 9696 has been flawless for us,” said Chirnside. “We’re taking the channel outputs right after the preamps via fiber, pre-fader, with no processing. The recorder sits in monitor world, so Will Burston is watching it during the show.”
“But really, once you’ve got your trim set, all you have to do is hit Record and let it go. We’re using a total of 36 channels, including 5 channels of ambient miking. Channel gain has basically stayed the same since the first day we started recording, so capturing and storing each performance is practically automatic.”
On the Pro6, Chirnside uses the Midas POPulation Groups and VCAs to provide quick access to all elements of his mix. Jet is a classic 5-piece rock band, with two guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, with all five members contributing vocals.
Chirnside has dedicated five of the Pro6’s six POP Groups to each band member, with the sixth Group carrying all the vocals. “That way, I can pull up any individual with one button-push, and I still have all my VCAs available as separate submixes,” he said.
On the Pro6, the extensive onboard DSP effects have been set up in a virtual rack for easy access. “The effects sound so good, we don’t carry any outboard gear at all,” said Chirnside.
“I’m using three reverbs – one for snare, another for tom, and one for vocals. They’re all done off the internal DN780 engine. I also run a delay, and the rest of my effects are stereo 3-band compressors, which gives me a little extra frequency compression I can call on if I need it, primarily on the main vocalists.”
Jet’s opening act, the Crash Kings, is also being mixed on the Pro6, though local openers are usually mixed by local engineers on the house console.
To accommodate this, Chirnside uses the Area B feature to carry the audio from the console, plus a stereo feed for walking-in music fed from an iPod. This allows the left side of the console (Area A) to be dedicated to Jet and Crash Kings settings, with seamless changeover between acts.
Chirnside, an early Pro6 adopter who has been using the Midas digital for two full years now, has been beyond pleased “I’ll tell you, from using house desks on the first few shows of this tour to when we picked up the Pro6, it makes a huge difference.”
“It really livens up the sound of these old house rigs. In virtually every venue we’ve played, the house engineer is amazed at how good their system sounds when it’s played through this console.”
