PRODUCTION PROFILE: Lady Gaga
Below: The Eat to the Beat catering crew; The Pyrotek Special Effects team; Monitor Engineer, Ramon Morales; Production Manager, Jason Danter.
needs a live sounding show, rocky in places, clubby in others. “It needs to sound very full of life so the live drums are the loudest element in the mix next to her vocals. The guitars do a lot of neat stuff too, they’re not doubling anything on the track, but rather doing their own live things all around it. She’s a talented musician as well as a performer, so she’s just wild to mix, and I want the rest of the show to sound equally as wild!” Does the wild nature of the artist mean there’s some grey areas for the engineers? “She’s pretty trusting with what we do, but when she wants something, she’s dead set in that she knows exactly what she wants to happen!” he laughed. As for Eighth Day, Rabold is also a fan: “Not only do they have good gear, but all of their guys know how to use it. I think they’ve always been ahead of the game with products and training their people to understand why those products do exactly what they do. The owner, Tom Arko is a good friend of mine and in a business of sharks, he’s definitely someone I don’t mind swimming with!”
this his third tour with her. “The SD7 is my desk of choice. Because it has so much flexibility, I can do pretty much anything I need to do on this and have almost no limitations on what I need. That seems to work out. It’s got enough input and output, I can route anything wherever I need to route it. It just does the job. It sounds great on top of that. It’s very robust, yeah. Very robust, when you’re doing this for such a long time, you need to find something robust. It’s got to keep up with everything else. For Gaga it’s more of a full mix, I would say, she kind of gets everything. Of course, she has to hear herself on top of everything and make sure she can still hear it all, so there’s a balance you have to find between all that. That goes for everybody else.” Also working out of monitor world is Daniel Bluhm, an RF Tech with a decent supply of Jammy Dodger biscuits. Working closely with Morales and managing 45 channels of RF daily, he told TPi: “We’re using Sennheiser 3732 wireless receivers mainly, and her Shure PSM 1000 in-ears and that combination is working out great.”
MONITOR WORLD Ramon Morales, Monitor Engineer has worked for Lady Gaga for the last four years, making
RIGGING As always, the rigging crew is first in the venue on a morning. Mike Farese, Head Rigger
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explained their routine: “We come in and mark the floor at about 7am and then we figure out our bridles for the different venues. Once we unload the trucks, we build the steel, hang the motors and run the gear, checking everything is in perfect working order. We’re using 128 Columbus McKinnon one and two tonne motors; they’re what I really like to use.” The tour runs an average of 50 tonnes in rigging weight, depending on the size of the venue and its needs. Truss is a standard package from lighting vendor PRG. Continued Farese: “This show works really well, it comes down and goes into the carts easily, which is very useful for us. ”The rigging crew is completed by Danny Machado, Rick Wilmot and Kenny ‘Skippy’ Ruhman. “This has been a great experience for me, I like it out here; we have a really nice team who work great together.” CATERING Backstage in the foodie hub of Birmingham’s NIA, the Eat To The Beat (ETTB) catering crew have made the arena kitchen into a scene from a busy family home; there’s a hum of friendly chattering, a hug a minute atmosphere and plates of tour grub being dished out to every kind of appetite. Susanne Howe, Operations Manager for ETTB and Susanne Power, Event