On the technical side, very interesting,
I don't know if you already read it somewhere, I forgot to check "Mix",
always interesting....
Tour Profile: Mariah Carey
Balancing ballads and Hip Hop
With 30-plus-years' experience as a front-of-house
engineer, including outings with Sting, James Taylor and Paul Simon, it's
safe to say that Howard Page has seen his share of unusual tour requirements.
Perhaps the most surprising specs he's encountered are on the current Mariah
Carey tour, for which the songstress has requested a collection of bejeweled
microphones. “The microphone's jewels have to match the dress she's wearing,
and that changes three, four or five times a night,” reports Page, who
now serves as director of engineering at Clair Bros./Showco. “So we have
about five or six different mics for her.”
So far, Page and the rest of the crew on the Adventures
of Mimi tour have watched the ballad-queen-turned-hip-hop superstar rotate
the inventory of microphones at arena shows in Tunisia, Japan, China and
all across the United States. When Carey, her four-piece band, three backup
singers and a handful of dancers stopped at the Oracle Arena (Oakland,
Calif.) in early October, she used silver, black and gold mics.
The all-Clair Bros. tour is carrying an i4 array.
Most of the adjustments are made during production rehearsals, leaving
Page time to speak about the amount of coverage he is getting from the
front and side arrays. “When you attempt to extend the horizontal coverage
of a line array system, you have to be incredibly careful,” he explains.
“You want to have minimal overlap of the pattern of the main [to avoid]
comb filtering, and you want a perfect continuation of the horizontal coverage
of the main array. Not only perfect in terms of the dispersion of the main
array versus the sides, but also time-aligned. Instead of using artificial
methods to make those two systems match, I have designed them such that
they are rigged in a perfect arc.”
Page also spent a fair amount of time perfecting
the bottom end, designing a steered sub-bass array. “My role is typically
to go out to tours and fix things that are not right, and I've been out
to many tours where the bottom end is an over-the-top, gut-wrenching, awful
noise,” he continues. “Sometimes it's a gain structure problem, but usually
it's a balance problem.”
On this tour, Page is using Prism II subs. “They
give me an absolute depth-defined note,” he says. “They may not be as musical
as other subs, but the idea is that for the level that I'm running this
show, which is quite loud, I want the tightness. The trade-off, unfortunately,
is that I have to sacrifice some depth in the low end to get that definition
and hear those notes.”
By steering the subs, he adds, he has virtually
eliminated the summing in the middle of the stage. “I've evened it out
across the floor,” Page says. “When you do that, if you create a true steered
array, it not only sounds good on the floor, but it ends up sounding good
in the high seats, as well.”
To cover the expensive seats in the front rows,
Page is using eight FF2 front-fill cabinets. “I'm a bit of a perfectionist,
so I have the middle set on one delay and the outer set on another,” the
FOH engineer comments. “The idea with front-fill delays is that you want
the image to appear bigger than it really is. That environment in the first
two rows is always a bit tricky to get right because if you just put little
front-fill speakers down there and turn them on, that is all those people
will hear. They don't get any feeling that they are in a big gig.”
Speakers aside, Page is using a fairly straight-ahead
setup at FOH that includes a Yamaha PM5D console and Clair Bros. I/Os driving
the system. “In a normal situation with my sound system, the I/Os at front
of house are almost straight-through devices,” Page explains. “I'm using
them as my D-to-A converters for the output of the Yamaha PM5D. I stay
in digital all the way to the I/Os at 96k and then I convert and run analog
to my [dbx] DriveRack.”
Page doesn't rely on much outboard gear — just
a touch of onboard limiting and a TC Electronic 6000 multi-effects processor
for reverb on Carey's ballads. “I see guys have compressors on every channel
and gates all over the place,” Page says. “Sometimes that's valid, but
what I notice is that it distracts from them mixing the show.”
Monitor compound
At the monitor position, Robert Miller is using
a Digidesign VENUE to mix eight pairs of stereo personal monitors, a mix
for the engineers below the stage, a mix for monitors that are flown over
the stage and placed on the side of the stage for the dancers, and a shaker
and a sub. “There are lot of things going on,” he says with a laugh, “but
I try to keep it as simple and straightforward as I can.”
Carey uses Ultimate Ears personal monitors, and,
yes, the pieces have bling, while the band and backup singers use Future
Sonics models. Miller delivers all onstage a straight-ahead mix. “There
is nothing too crazy going on,” he says. “Everybody gets a nice blended
mix. I've worked on some tours where the music is in their left ear and
the vocals in their right ear. It's not like that. Everyone has a stereo
mix with good separation.” The flown and side monitor cabinets are Clair
Bros. R4s.
Knowing that this tour was going to take them
across the globe, Miller picked the VENUE board for its availability and
kept the list of plug-ins simple. “I stuck with the standard Digidesign
plug-ins so I can get them wherever we go,” he explains. “I didn't want
to be needing something that wasn't available.” Troodon Technologies' TrooTrace
Audio Analysis Bundle, which he uses as a spectrum analyzer, is one of
his more useful plug-ins.
Singing the video
Where it gets challenging, though, is when Carey
sings with videotaped performances by such artists as Jay-Z and Jermaine
Dupri on the more rap-flavored tracks. “She interfaces with [the video]
and Mariah winds vocally in and out between the rap track with this larger-than-life
hip hop feel going on behind her,” Page says. “The essential thing is that
you have to have the gain structure on your console completely in control
at all times. In those circumstances, if you're not careful of the overall
level you're running or of the interplay between all of the elements of
your mix at all times, it will train-wreck in a heartbeat.”
That's especially true, Page adds, with so many
elements to juggle. “There's the little rap section, now it's back to Mariah,
now a little keyboard riff, now a scratch hook from the DJ,” he describes.
“Suddenly, you get a situation that I call ‘everything louder than everything
else,’ and you've lost any reference point of your mix.”
This tour, featuring Carey's catalog of songs
that bounces between ballads and hip hop tracks, has given Page an opportunity
to prove a philosophy that he's worked with since early in his career.
“Excessive low end fatigues an audience, and three-quarters of the way
through a show, you notice that they are not as excited and up for the
next song as they were in the beginning,” Page says. “It's essentially
because, psycho-acoustically, you are beating them to a pulp with the low
end. When I get an opportunity, I give the audience what I call ‘an acoustic
breath.’
“There's an interesting psychological thing that
goes on with an audience,” he continues. “They scream their heads off during
the show, but when she starts a ballad, they scream for about four words
of a song and rather than me turning it up to fight them, I leave it where
it is and they all stop screaming. They are essentially here to hear the
song. If you give them a dynamic breath, they will come back and they'll
listen.”
Source: Mix
(All rights reserved)
Posted on January the 19th. |
