For Annie Lennox's Songs of Mass Destruction tour, Clair Bros. is providing 10 i3 speakers flown per side, four ground-stacked Clair BT subs a side and six FF2 front-fills along the front of the stage. Mix caught up with front-of-house engineer Paul Ramsay and monitor engineer Blake Suib in San Francisco.

As the tour is playing small theaters, Ramsay mixes the show as low as possible while still giving the audience a nice, full sound. “I keep an eye on the level and often am just reinforcing the stage sound by adding what's not heard from the stage,” he says, adding that he's mixing on a DiGiCo D5, a board he's been working with since April 2003. “I use several of the internal effects for reverbs, delays and doubler, plus I use the internal gates and compressors,” he adds. “I have an external rack with two Avalon VT 737SPs, two XTAs and a TC Electronic D-Two.” Effects include a TC Reverb 6000, using all four engines running AES in and out, and a TC Electronic TC 2290 dynamic digital delay. “Both of these are MIDI to the console for snapshot scene changes,” Ramsay explains. Speaker management is via four Dolby Lake Processors.

Suib is mixing on a Digidesign VENUE, saying it has everything he needs for this tour and sounds great, using such onboard plug-ins as Bomb Factory BF-3A compressors, Focusrite EQ and Digidesign ReVibe. “Annie's not on in-ears,” Suib adds. “A few of the guys are using generic in-ears, but this is mostly a wedge tour. Mixing monitors for Annie is a pleasure. She gives me plenty of input to work with, which makes it easy to get the sound she is looking for. We have a great crew out here. Todd Hudson from Clair Showco always goes out of his way to make sure you have everything you want.” Adds Ramsay: “We also have [system engineer] Jim Ragus and Don Baker. All around a great tour!”