Electro-punk pop duo The Ting Tings provided their new Front Of House Engineer Trevor Gilligan with plenty to think about on their recent U.K. tour.
For the group’s first production tour following their hit single “That’s Not My Name,” they occasionally played through the house system but the staple was nine Martin Audio W8LC compact line array enclosures to be flown either side (with four ground-stacked WS218X subs.)
Gilligan is an old hand with his favored Martin Audio compact line array – again provided by production company Capital Sound Hire – having earlier worked stints with the system on Starsailor, Kasabian, the Hoosiers, St. Etienne and other tours.
“I have always liked the Martin Audio line array concept because it is a horn-loaded system and you can use the coloration to your advantage. It’s an easy system to work – they are certainly punchy yet easy on the ear; for the Ting Tings we were delivering a nice fat 100 dB,” states Gilligan.
The Ting Tings’ Jules De Martino (drums, guitar, vocals) and Katie White (vocals, guitar, bass drum) serve up a versatile mix, swopping instruments mid-number and introducing a brass section on four numbers, while De Martino delivers a maze of electronic loops activated by half a dozen foot panels.
Gilligan says that the duo had asked him to dirty up the mix “to make the drums more bumpy and fat. Jules wanted it gritty at the low end. In other words, although the mix is similar to the album I have had to add weight to the low end so that once the crowd recognize the song they can really get off on it.”
He made minimal use of the effects on his Yamaha M7CL console: “It’s mainly a pretty raw mix; essentially them coming down the channels.”
In addition Capital Sound Hire provided four Martin W2’s for front fill and a W8C for outfill. “This is just to give presence around the side where the array isn’t hitting,” says Capital Sound Hire System Tech Toby Donovan.
Martin Audio components also featured heavily at the stage end with a mix of in-ears and sleek Martin Audio LE1500 floor wedges (Cap Sound having come up with some clever presets of their own to optimize the floor monitors).
