ON THE ROAD: George Michael
Below: Production Manager, Dennis Gardner, and Tour Director, Ken Watts; Monitor Engineer Andy ‘Baggy’ Robinson headed up the tour’s sound department; FOH Engineer Gary Bradshaw with the DiGiCo SD7; Simon Hall, Monitor Engineer for the band with two SD7’s.
new racks allow sharing of outputs, which the old system didn’t, so we can now have less racks to build a bigger system. Baggy continued, “And we are all sharing
one set of racks for this tour, not something that usually happens, but we decided we could make it work and we have, without compromise.” Baggy also requires a Midas XL3 as Michael’s
monitoring is set up to keep his radio mic analogue to his IEMs. “This is because in digital desks there is latency when the signal is converted from analogue to digital and back again. When singing with IEMs, if it has been slightly delayed, it arrives later than the head voice within your ear canal, which creates a slight chorus effect and it’s harder to EQ. It is worth the extra equipment and effort to make this work to deliver the best IEM sound.” There are no wedges on stage in a deliberate
move to keep the stage noise to a minimum. The band have wired IEMs while the orchestra has headphones running powered by power amps with volume boxes on each individual chairs to control the level. All 26 of the wireless IEMS are from the
Sennhesier 2000 Series. For mics, Sennheiser again take the lead with 10 hand held devices. Michael uses the 5200 Series with Neuman 105 capsules, the four backing vocalists also use the 5200 Series with the new Sennheiser 5235 capsule. “Sennheiser are the best in the industry,”
42 • TPi NOVEMBER 2011
Baggy insisted. “Easy to talk to, full of technical support and the gear sounds great. RF wise, this show is full on with about 40 channels and a huge LED screen, making it harder. LED screens and some lights give off stray RF noise, which in turn lifts the noise floor, George Hogan spends his time tuning around these things and careful placement of aerials helps.” Baggy generates one stereo mix for Michael
which then feeds the IEMS from the XL3 and analogue mics go straight into the XL3. The level is controlled on a custom built VCA fader. Band and vocal effects are generated in the SD7, which then feeds stereo music and the
concluded Baggy. “When you have the opportunities to push the boundaries for the perfect sound system it is always a learning curve for both us and the suppliers, because we push them to give us the most equipment. I only work to learn, if I knew it all there would be no challenge.” While Baggy mans Michael’s monitors,
the band and orchestra desks are operated by Simon Hall. “I’ve got a lot of mixes going on,” said Hall. “For the majority of the tour, our own symphony orchestra travels with us. This is made up of around 11 musicians from the UK with the rest from the Czech National
“When you have the opportunities to push the boundaries for the perfect sound system it is always a learning curve.”
stereo effects into the XL3 to join the vocal. The biggest achievement for Baggy and his
crew is some mean feat. They have created the biggest DiGiCo rig to date with a total of four SD7’s in operation on an Optocore loop. A further console will be added for the Royal Albert Hall shows the following week and the fifth desk will be on madi splits to produce the broadcast mix for the TV shoot at the Royal Opera House. With all of the desks, the sound dept is running an incredible 1250 audio paths. “As an engineer, we’re always learning,”
Symphony Orchestra. “However, due to logistics and special
guest appearances, we change our orchestras at various points, whilst always keeping the UK 11 for consistency. To account for this, the orchestra receives mixes per section. “The band and backing vocalists all have
their own mixes. I also do all the sub mixes for the strings, plus sub mixes between my two SD7s, because the band sub mixes to the orchestra desk and vice versa. We couldn’t fit everything on one console because when you
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