(14/06/2015) Adlib supplied full technical production - lighting, projection and audio - for the recent John Barrowman Raise Me Up' UK tour which saw the multi-talented entertainer take his musicality combined with personal stories, into a mix of theatres, concert halls and arenas around the country. Steve Rayment once again headed up the tour as production manager.
It is the sixth JB tour in which Adlib has been involved. The first one was in 2008, and once again, the Liverpool based company won the business because they could offer all the resources and flexibility of a single source technical solution, making the package cost-effective as well as efficient to their client.
Beautiful Sound
A Coda ViRAY system was chosen by FOH engineer Walter Jaquiss. He was one of the first engineers to take its predecessor LA12 out on the previous two JB tours and wanted a similar sound but in a smaller more contemporary package, so ViRAY was perfect. It was particularly important to have a compact sized system as weight loading and physical size / sight lines were issues in several places.
Adlib's Alan Harrison, PA systems tech and the person fine tuning the system each day, commented, The ViRAY gave us maximum control and SPL everywhere it was needed it really is a hugely dynamic system. He is a big advocate of the brand, especially for theatre / cabaret style acts like this.
A typical set up would be 16 x ViRAY elements per side with six SCP subs set up where possible in a left-centre-right configuration on the floor.
It's all about the definition of every single source onstage for this one, explained Alan referring to JB and his seven piece band. With drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and a three piece brass section plus his very strong vocals it was an intricate task to separate these out, and each individual sound needed to be spot-on'.
Overall, Alan concludes that the Coda sound is unmatchable in its ability to deliver smooth, very clear sound right across a room for this style of performance.
For lip fills and in / out fills as needed, they used the TiRAY Coda's smallest line array speaker which, for their miniscule dimensions, emit a huge amount of power and definition.
For processing and EQ, they used one of Adlib's standard Lake racks with 2 x LM44s and a pair of LM26s and he used a combination of AFMG SysTune and Rational Acoustics' Smaart to get the balance just right every day.
Having mixed John Barrowmans tours for over six years, Walter was asked back to mix FOH on his recent UK tour, again with Adlib being the preferred audio supplier. This time he chose a Soundcraft Vi3000.
He was attracted to the Vi3000 for a number of reasons. Familiarity, quality and size were priorities he revealed. Having always mixed John Barrowmans live tours on the Vi6 in the past, it was a seamless change to move to the Vi3000. With the console software and layout nearly identical to the other Vi platforms, he only needed the 3 days of scheduled production rehearsals prior to the start of the tour to be able to create his show file.
We also needed a smaller footprint at FOH that would take up less seats and in-turn reduce the truck pack, he further explained. Specifying a Vi3000 for both FOH and monitors gained the tour an entire row of a truck-space without compromising on any of the audio requirements mainly due to no local rack being required and a smaller console frame.
Walter had the console fitted with an extra two MADI cards. He could run MADI with a fibre multicore, MADI for the Realtime Rack platform and Dante for recording to Reaper simultaneously as well as using some of the spare Dante streams for vocal inserts via Waves Multirack running natively on his MacBook Pro.
His FOH console was supplied with one of Adlibs standard UAD Realtime Rack plugin setups, a MADI based I/O environment that gave a minimum of 16 patchable streams of UAD plugins hosted by a pre-authorised device, broadly similar to the UAD Apollo, it comes pre-wired and installed in all of their touring Vi3000 packages.
A combination of low latency and high quality was my main reason for requesting this, said Walter, adding that the set up allowed him to introduce some extra high quality FX into his mix on top of the Vi3000 inbuilt FX as well as giving access to various studio based compressor and channel strip plugins that we now see as standard in many other live consoles .
The combination of the Vi3000, the UAD Realtime Rack and the Coda ViRAY gave me the tools I needed to deliver Johns shows to artist and management expectations, concluded Walter.
Mixing a busy 56 inputs from stage was the main challenge, to produce a smooth, high clarity fully intelligible sound, for which Walter and the Coda system were a perfect combination.
The monitor set up continued on an expedient theme with another Soundcraft Vi3000. The band were all on Shure hard wired IEMs, with wireless Sennheiser G3 IEMs for JB and MD Matt Brind.
A pair of Adlib MP2 wedges were provided as stage fills for the four dancers.
It was a quick and easy to set-up stage, and also nice and quiet, which was great help for the FOH mix. Having the majority of hard-wired channels also meant they didn't have to spend too much time searching for available frequencies.
Glorious Lighting
Adlib also supplied lighting to the last tour, but this year their own award winning LD and visual designer Ian Tomlinson created the lighting scheme, the principal criteria being that it needed to fit into the available truck space and offer all the diversity and scope needed for a JB live show embracing multiple performance styles.
Ryan Hopkins was on-board to operate and direct the lighting on the road, before which he spent a few days with Ian in Adlib's WYSIWYG suite plus a couple of days production rehearsals a
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(14/06/2015) Adlib supplied full technical production - lighting, projection and audio - for the recent John Barrowman Raise Me Up' UK tour which saw the multi-talented entertainer take his musicality combined with personal stories, into a mix of theatres, concert halls and arenas around the country. Steve Rayment once again headed up the tour as production manager.
