There’s leading edge, and there’s bleeding edge. The difficulty is striving for the first while avoiding the second, often a very fine line, and one that was straddled with great success by the sound team in deploying a new main system for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers on the Hypnotic Eye concert tour of North America, which wraps up in mid-October with dates at the Forum in Los Angeles.
The tour visited a variety of venues, including sheds, arenas, the Gorge and Red Rocks amphitheaters and even venerable Fenway Park in Boston, and as usual with TP & HB, enjoyed great success in packing the house in whatever form it happened to be.
Still going full throttle after almost 40 years, the group has attained icon status, continuing to create compelling new music with dozens of past hits remaining in heavy rotation on rock radio, appealing to both long-time loyalists as well as a growing younger generation of fans.
The music is largely straight-up classic rock ‘n’ roll, sometimes with interesting deviations, always served up by a cohesive, talented group in garage band style. Petty’s unique vocal timbre fits perfectly within a tapestry created by Mike Campbell (lead guitar), Benmont Tench (keyboards), Ron Blair (bass), Scott Thurston (guitar, keys, multi instruments), and Steve Ferrone (drums).
Hypnotic Eye marks front of house engineer Robert Scovill’s 20th year with TP & HB, first taking the helm for the Wildflowers tour in 1994. Long noted for his ability to present concert sound marked by textured mixes perfectly fitting the material, delivered with seamless coverage, this time out he was backed up by systems engineer Andrew Dowling, who despite his relative youth has racked up service with an impressive list of top tours.
“When I first moved into this gig, I was already a big fan of the production quality of the records,” Scovill notes. “But it wasn’t until I moved behind the console that I ‘got it’ as far as who they truly are from a musical standpoint. I was able to clearly see where the music they make really comes from, and that’s informed how we support them in the concert realm.”
A great deal of mutual respect has been established in successfully collaborating over two decades, and it’s borne out on Hypnotic Eye, with Scovill choosing to utilize a new EAW Anya system—the very first tour to do so, and a high-profile one at that, to say the least. “It’s a bit of a risk, no doubt,” he confirms. “There has to be a lot of trust there for them to be OK with it. But we see eye to eye on so many things after working so closely over the years.”
Doing The Homework
I first got word that the tour would be traveling with Anya at the InfoComm show last July in Las Vegas, hearing it directly from Scovill in person prior to a press conference making it official. “Anya is a game-changer,” he stated emphatically. “I haven’t been this excited about a new approach to PA technology in a couple of decades now. It’s a leap forward in the quality and the way in which audio can be presented to a large audience.”
The decision wasn’t made lightly. He first spent a great deal of time with a demo system—looking it over, flying it, mixing on it, performing extensive FFT measurements with arrays in the air, and so on. It was a process far beyond the scope of normal due diligence, and only after that did he speak with Dave Shadoan and the team at Sound Image (Escondido, CA and Nashville), the tour’s long-time sound company, about adding the system to their inventory.
Shadoan notes, “We analyze, watch and develop evolving technology closely, and strive to remain at the technological forefront in the touring industry. When we see a product that has the potential to cut a new path, we will certainly get involved. So when Robert came to us with the concept of using Anya for Tom Petty, we knew that it was time to pay attention, as we’d been monitoring the Anya system as well.”
Briefly, Anya is based on a concept that EAW calls Adaptive Performance, designed to generate virtually any three-dimensional wavefront surface. The loudspeaker modules incorporate 22 transducers, each independently driven by its own amplifier and DSP channel. The array columns hang straight down, allowing out fill arrays to hang directly adjacent to the mains.
Input to the system’s Resolution software interface generates DSP parameters to simultaneously adapt the wavefront surface and optimize the system’s frequency response to match the specific requirements of the venue. (Go here for more about Anya.)