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RIVAGE PM5 IS OUT FOR BLOOD Royal Blood FOH Engineer, Phil Jones extols the virtues of Yamaha’s digital mixing solution, RIVAGE PM5.
Photos: Joeseth Carter and Karl Christmas
FOH Engineer, Phil Jones.
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Having scored a hat-trick of UK number one albums, this summer Royal Blood set off on a UK tour of headline and festival shows, before heading to Mexico. FOH Engineer, Phil Jones has discovered that the Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 digital mixing system offers many solutions to difficulties faced by tours in the early 2020s. Many artists would be happy with a UK number one album but achieving the feat with your first three shows that Royal Blood are on to something special, despite the band’s minimalist line up of bass, drums and vocals. Jones has known the band since its beginnings in the Brighton area. Previously he worked as Production and Tour Manager but, as the band’s shows grew from pubs to arenas, he increasingly focused on the sound. “My aim is to make the sound as comfortably loud as possible,” he stated. “In the past, I used to tour a lot of gear. I wasn’t a fan of computers managing the sound, so I had twin 24u racks with outboard ranging from preamps and dynamic EQs for vocals to an array of dbx, TC Electronic, Eventide and Bricasti effects units.” After being introduced to Yamaha RIVAGE PM digital mixing systems at the Neighbourhood Weekend festival in 2019, when the RIVAGE PM5 was launched in 2020, he took the opportunity to try it out on a broadcast recording session with the band, provided by long time supplier, Britannia Row Productions. “I was so impressed that I adopted RIVAGE PM5 for my live setup and sold most of my outboard gear, including my H3000 and Bricasti reverb. I simply didn’t need them anymore,” he said. The logistics and costs of touring in a pandemic, post-Brexit world are very different to what they were only a couple of years ago.