ON THE ROAD: Pet Shop Boys
Below: Production Manager, Thomas Stone; Monitor Engineer, Seamus Fenton and NEXO Technical Support Engineer, Val Gilbert; Stage Manager, Matthew Gurney; FOH Engineer, Holger Schwark; The Eat To The Beat team; Jeffrey Bryant has produced the Pet Shop Boys’ costumes; Mark Webber and Andrew Turner from ER Productions; Tour Manager, Andrew Crookstone.
few positive comments after each concert, so I can safely assume that many others liked the sound.” Ian Colville, Capital Sound Hire’s Technical Manager, offered his perspective: “Capital Sound has been involved with the STM project from day one and it’s very rewarding to be able to introduce the system to our clients and for it to be so well received. These two shows are the largest that we have undertaken with STM to date and I think that the speed with which the system can be rigged and de-rigged was particularly impressive. The ability to tailor a STM system design to suit a particular type of programme material or just the engineer’s personal taste is also a massive advantage and I’m looking forward to creating bespoke designs utilising the STM building blocks, as we’ve done with The Pet Shop Boys.” MIXING AND MERGING MADI STREAMS Monitor Engineer, Seamus Fenton’s career has seen him mix for the likes of Paul Weller and The Fugees before working on three of the Pet Shop Boys’ tours. Fenton selected the DiGiCo SD10 console, believing it to be best suited. “It had to be DiGiCo because the console needed to work with MADI generically,” explained the engineer. “We chose it on the last tour too because the whole gig evolves around mixing and merging two MADI streams. The beauty of this desk is its macro features and the new software version of Nitrous has turned what was a fantastic monitor desk into the best.” Fenton generated six in-ear mixes during the show. On the previous tour, Chris Lowe, used wedges, but because the original brief for Electric was for the band members to appear in different positions throughout the show, in-ear monitoring was necessary. “Speakers were a no go,” said the band’s longtime engineer, “because they’d be moving about a lot. So Chris is new to in-ears and Neil’s never done 54
a gig on wedges. After the digital switchover we needed to look at different in-ear options and I’d worked on Jesus Christ Superstar with Roger Lindsay, who was a big Shure man. He gave me a PSM 1000 to try out and I found it to be brilliant. It was a no-brainer, mainly because they are true diversity in-ear packs and have two balanced antennas. The RF is robust and they are much more hi-fi sounding. The Pet Shop Boys own their own radio rack, which was built on the first tour and then adapted. It was a fresh start for mics for this production, however. “My friend, Barry Macleod from Britannia Row - who is my guru in terms of the radio world - said I should try the new digital Shures. Since we were buying six PSM 1000’s anyway we looked at getting the Shure UHF-R wireless systems.” For the first show in Mexico the audio crew took both the UHF-R originals and new ULXDs to test out. “The first thing we noticed at rehearsals was they sounded incredible. The other option with the ULX-Ds is they can be connected to the system digitally,” said Fenton. “In the SD rack on stage there’s also a Dante card so effectively the mics are patched digitally and analogue, with FOH taking the digital and me taking the analogue one.” All mics were Shure ULX-Ds with Shure KSM9 capsules. “The entire radio system is bespoke because the boys always need a radio rack, which is owned by the band although supplied by Capital Sound.” FOH Engineer, Holger Schwark, was also a fan of the quality of the ULX-D microphones, having already had positive experiences with the UHF-R. “You notice such a difference in clarity. It’s like switching from an MP3 to a CD on a good stereo system - it has more clarity and definition in the mid range,” he commented. EXTRA FLEXIBILITY Similarly to Fenton, Electric was not FOH Engineer, Holger Schwark’s first experience
of mixing the Pet Shop Boys. DiGiCo desks featured at FOH as well as in monitor world, with Schwark also opting for the SD10-24. “DiGiCo desks are my desks of choice, for their sound quality and usability. In 2009, we started adding a network system made by Optocore because I didn’t want to use copper MADI cables at festivals,” he explained. Schwark used a Waves SoundGrid server for the first time. He elaborated on the benefits this brought with it: “It’s basically technology for running plug-ins on the desk. It’s a new addition to my set-up and has been great fun to work with. I’ve been using plug-ins on previous tours, running inside my laptop, but it’s of benefit to have them all integrated with the mixer system because if there should ever be any problems with the plug-in processors, the mixer will bypass those inserts automatically.” One snapshot was run per song, with Levels, EQ and Plug-in effect settings being changed for certain elements. The engineer worked with a TC 6000 reverb along with a TC-Helicon VoicePro processor. “This gives me some live vocal doubles that are really cool,” he added. “I’m doing quite a bit with the vocals as it’s an essential part of the show.” For processing and control he carries a Meyer Sound Galileo 616 AES - his favourite system EQ, which sits in the side rack. Schwark and Fenton relied on an Optocore ‘multicore’ system to transfer signals, and keep the sound within the digital domain. While the SD10 consoles come equipped with an optical loop interface, they decided instead to run Optocore as an entirely independent network, giving them greater flexibility to patch signals between the MADIequipped multitrack playback computers, the SD-Rack, the two mixing desks, a MADIequipped Mac Mini at FOH, and finally an independent additional MADI output for occasional multichannel recording - keeping