Processing Approaches
Onstage, everyone was seeking a natural sound. “However, what works for one person doesn’t always work for another to obtain similar results,” Larcey adds. “True, some of the magic of audio may evolve from compression techniques, but an artist who sings as beautifully as Alison wants to hear her own voice onstage in a totally clean fashion.
“Compression is not part of her language, she needs to hear all the dynamics her mic technique reveals. Conversely, I didn’t want to be turning her vocal up and down to meet the needs of everyone else onstage, so I ran a split channel that I EQ’ed a bit darker, and that could be managed with little more than some simple gain without having an impact on the tone or sounding compressed for everyone else.”
All inputs were hardwired onstage with the exception of three: Sidney Cox’s dobro and guitar, and a third for a vintage Martin acoustic guitar played by Block. To provide a stable sound that didn’t have the potential to feedback in higher gain situations, a ToneDexter preamp from Audio Sprockets was applied to Cox’s inputs along with a tuner and pedal board managed by a guitar tech.
“I’m embarrassed to admit this,” Reddy says before making a quick retraction – “No I’m not embarrassed to admit this: I only used one reverb for the entire composition of my house mix.”
He had some trepidation when first asked if he’d utilize the PRO X but eventually warmed up to the technology. “I was terrified,” he admits. “Because I’m an old dog and I don’t like learning new digital tricks. I had to re-approach a few things in my control strategy, but now I have to say I was surprised when I really identified with the sonic quality of the thing. I had heard about this, and I’ve often said digital consoles all sound better than the decisions I’ll make, but in terms of the transparency we were seeking, if good high frequency is table sugar, well, this was clarified honey on top – really smooth and soft. I had to do a little head-scratching in the beginning with file management – the desk has a unique process of managing session data, scenes, etc. – but once I got my head around it I was OK.”
Reddy maintained a blueprint in the house where no outboard racks were required, with everything in terms of effects provided from within the box. While he, just like Larcey, prepared a scene for every song, his managed little beyond mute, fader positions, and a tiny bit of aux.
“The music couldn’t have been more organic in nature,” he says as a precursor to describing his approach. “It was just so wholesome and honest. In response, my whole agenda revolved around tone, tone, balance, tone, balance. It was all about keeping the soundscape relative to what was happening musically. The way I looked at it, if I could hear how great my reverb was sounding, it was too loud.
“I didn’t want to crowd anything, just try to make it as revealing as possible, as well as intimate and up close. The best results were obtained by keeping it simple, and letting all the parts be. I was humbled by the quality of delivery I received from everyone onstage. Alison works that mic at a high skill level. It was unbelievable how little I had to reach for the compressor. She was very predictable, really does most of it herself, so it was kind of crazy how simple it was.”
Shorter Sticks
With the show’s abundance of acoustic instruments and a lead vocalist who spent most of the night six to eight inches away from the microphone capsule, in his estimation the more PA Reddy had, the better.
“Our PA du jour situation required additional strategies,” he confides. “While our stage sounded natural and wonderful, I wasn’t obtaining big amounts of input from up there, and that meant I did not have infinite gain before feedback. Therefore, PA du jour was a factor for me in that small systems, flying down low, didn’t have the low-mid and low frequency directivity of a larger amount of large format boxes, and this shorter stick of small speakers we would sometimes encounter would have too much energy wrapping around behind the baffle spilling onto the stage. Given all of that, my preferred situation was just to have a ridiculously large lens of speakers every night so I would have more forward radiating power and less landing back onstage.
“More linear array is almost never a bad thing, especially in open-air sites where we were trying to project 300 feet back,” he continues. “A rock band may be respectably loud at that distance, but at 88 dB peak for this show, the inverse square law says you may not hear much at 300 feet unless you have a really long stick of stuff to be able to commit a good portion of that lens to the far shot.”
That can be expected, but on a closing note, what about the unexpected? “Every tour has its share of surprises,” Reddy concludes. “I guess the thing that surprised me most was how many times I would get goosebumps from the quality of the music and the transparency we were achieving. I was having to pinch myself, and again, a lot of credit has to go back to the artists.
“And hats off to Michael too. He did all the work building his control and wiring the stage and all. All I did was put my mix position together and then run around and annoy everyone all day with pink noise.”