Hilltop Hoods’ The Show Business Tour completely sold out all of their Australian arena gigs in August and September. This is the band’s first headline tour since The Great Expanse World Tour in 2019 which saw them playing sold-out arenas to over 100,000 fans in 14 different countries. This was Hilltop Hoods’ biggest and most successful headline tour to date, where they also created history with the largest tour of any Australian act in 2019.
FOH sound engineer Andrew Kelly has been with the band for around fifteen years both locally and overseas.
“I mix true, loud and clean,” he commented when asked how he mixes the act. “Front to back, side to side it’s very important to us that every member of the audience has the same audible experience.”
Andrew was running a large d&b audiotechnik J-Series rig at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena saying that d&b ArrayProcessing has changed the game for large-size venues.
“The output control across the arc means you can grade how hard she blows on the closer patrons and push the top elements more to reach the nosebleed section with clarity and headroom,” he said. “It’s a no-brainer in my opinion. There are other parameters but that is the real component that sets the bar.”
When it comes to console choice, Andrew is comfortable using any decent console. On this tour, he was on the Avid S6 which he says surpasses the Profile by a mile in clarity and efficiency.
“I used a Midas Heritage-D Series digital console towards the end of last year for a show and that was good,” he added. “Mics are stock standard with condensers on cymbals as I close-mic them because I’m not after a ‘room’ sound. I use a regular Shure SM57 on snare top and it’s the one channel I do the least to – just EQ/filter and a bit of verb. I let the drummer be the variable on the snare. I like the Shure SM57 as it has this wider polarity feel to it, it gets the strike and the shell so to speak. Tom has a Sennheiser mic that clips well and sounds nice and true.”
All of the brass use Shure Beta57 which Andrew says has a good top-end register and clarity plus they are sturdy and reliable. The MCs use a wireless Shure Beta 58.
“Again sturdy and true,” said Andrew. “The newer Axient has a great output level range so setting them with no clipping is easier and they are very reliable and familiar.”
Snips (Hayden Ineson) recently took on the role of monitor engineer running a DiGiCo SD12. The brass and vocalist Nyassa use IEMs but the band prefers the ‘live’ feel of stage monitors. Again d&b delivers the best output with clarity with a lot of M2 floor monitors and flown side fill.
Andrew’s main challenge is getting the audio over the crowd! Stage volume can be a component but at this gig, just the sheer space and height of the venue and getting the best coverage was challenging but Andrew feels that he got there.
“The Sydney show went very well, one of the best performances of the tour in my opinion,” he concluded.
