Tom Jones will never go out of fashion, so Mix caught up with his guitarist/musical director Brian Monroney and the sound engineers when he hit San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium.
Monroney: “We have Metric Halo gear with us: three Mobile I/O 2882s, with two of them offstage connected to a pair of Mac G4s used for playback of backing tracks, and a third one in the keyboard rig. [Keyboardist Frank Strauss runs Native Instruments' B4 and Pro-53 soft synths on a G4 PowerBook.] The two offstage systems are identical, both running Digital Performer, and are used to play back tracks on about a quarter of the songs in the show. We send three stereo submixes to FOH, and monitors get the same stems, plus two click/count-off channels: one for our drummer, Herman Matthews, and the other one goes to keyboards and Tom.
“We're basically taking advantage of only a fraction of what the Mobile I/Os can do, but they sound exceptionally good and they've been rock-solid, both in terms of their physical design and the stability of the software/drivers. Tom's tour manager, Sandy Battaglia, provides and maintains all the backline gear through his company, Gig Productions, and he gave me carte blanche in setting up these systems.”
FOH engineer Tom Woodcock mixes on a 48-channel Yamaha PM4000 using 46 inputs, while monitor engineer Ed Ehrbar uses a Yamaha PM4000M, with 52 input channels. “I'm running 14 in-ear mixes for the band and Tom, and two wedge mixes. Tom has been using Shure mics live for his entire career. He says he bought his first one while singing in clubs in Wales during the early 1960s. We are currently using a Beta 58A.”
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