Jeff Beck is currently touring in support of “Emotion & Commotion” – his first studio album in 7 years that debuted last month at number 11 on Billboard.
Beck is one of the guitar gods, along with Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, to have played with the Yardbirds.
He left to form The Jeff Beck Group in 1967, with Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on bass.
Beck has gone on to earn five Grammy Awards for “Best Rock Instrumental,” and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.
A guitarist’s guitarist, he plays his signature Fender Stratocaster with just his fingers, occasionally the vibrato bar and a streamlined pedal board, to produce a wide variety of sounds.
The sound vendor for the tour since 2006 has been Schubert Systems. Headed by Dirk Schubert, the company is celebrating its 30th anniversary at the end of this month.
Mike Gonzales is the tour rep and the system tech is Vince Buller. Front of House Engineer Ben Findlay mixes on a Digidesign (now Avid) Profile.
After a brief spell playing guitar in bands while in school and college, Findlay began mixing live shows with a small PA system co-owned with a friend. He then moved along to work with other PA companies in the Bristol (U.K.) area, with his first tour as House Engineer coming in 1989 for the (then) newly signed band The Blue Aeroplanes.
In 1991 he landed a job at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio as an assistant engineer, and after a couple of years of frantic work and a steep leaning curve, he became chief engineer of the studio for four years. By 1998 Findley went freelance, continuing to work at Real World as a client and at a variety of other studios in countries around the world.
“In 2003 Peter Gabriel was looking for a FOH Engineer for his ‘Growing Up Live’ tour, and at that time, I had been mixing in the studio for him so he thought I might be able to mix the shows,” Findlay explains.
“I wasn’t sacked, and as a result of the confidence gained mixing a large scale show like that, I took on other live work.”
Along with Gabriel, Findley has also worked with Massive Attack, Youssou N’Dour, Robert Plant and Yusuf Goldfrapp (formerly Cat Stevens).
At the beginning of this year, Beck had a change of lineup for his band, joined by Rhonda Smith on bass and Narada Michael Walden on drums.
This is an overdue reunion for Walden, who received a gold record for the album “Wired,” which he co-wrote with Beck, as well as produced and played drums on 35 years ago. Walden – already a keen user of Audix mics – and Findlay put together a “Rolls Royce” mic package for the current tour.
