Sound Engineer Callum Howell first met the guys from Ocean Alley in 2015 at a studio recording their second EP. The following year they asked him to do their debut album and off the back of that, they asked him if he would like to tour with them as well.
“I started on FOH and TM in 2016 and did that for about a year before moving to FOH and PM,” said Callum. “On this tour, I’m exclusively FOH which is great! It gives me a lot of time to focus on the actual gig and has allowed me plenty of time to get the show as tight as I can on my end.
“When it comes to interpreting their sound, they leave that up to me for the most part. We work together on sounds if something isn’t quite up to scratch or isn’t fitting. I think my focus and what they like is to achieve a bigger and fatter version of what we did on the records.”
“Some other manufacturers seem to have a pretty obvious “tone” to their systems which I find I always end up fighting,” he added. “We haven’t been able to supply PA for every show due to budgets. Where we have supplied PA it’s been 12 a side d&b KSL with 12 x SL subs and V outfills scaled to the venue layout and size. All PA and control on this tour have been supplied by the lovely folks at Eighth Day Sound. I really can’t give a big enough shout out to Eighth Day, all their crew are great and they’ve been so understanding with all the rescheduling.”
For control, Callum uses Digico exclusively as he has become so comfortable on them over the years and he likes their flexibility.
“It does feel like you can do anything you can think of with those consoles,” he elaborated. “For this tour, I’m on an SD5 with Waves SuperRack and an Extreme Server. I also have a FOH fruit rack with 1 x Neve Master Bus Processor on the mixbus, 2 x Distressors and 1 x Neve 5045 on lead and backing vocal duties, a Bricasti M7 for lead vocal reverbs and a TC D-Two for delay throws. I run a boss FS-6 via TRS into the pedal input of the D-Two to tap tempo and mute the input of the unit.”
There are a lot of guitar and keys rides during the show, all the boys play different roles and often swap leads so Callum needs to stay on top of that! Otherwise, it’s a lot of delay throws and changing FX per song. Some of these changes are programmed into snapshots if it’s something that is happening consistently every show, others he does manually eg. lead vocal FX changes as the amount of reverb and slap delay can vary from venue to venue.
Callum says that there are fewer and fewer mics these days; the drums and vocals are the only live mics on stage currently.
Drum mic list:
- Kick in – Beta 91a
- Kick Out – Telefunken M82
- Snr Top – SE V7x
- Snr Bottom – SM57
- HH – Neumann KM184
- Rack – Sennheiser e604
- Floor1 – Sennheiser e604
- Floor2 – Sennheiser e604
- Ride – Neumann KM184
- UHL – SE 4400
- UHR – SE 4400
In addition to the above mics, triggers have been incorporated onto all the shells which are used for gate control (no samples!).
“The triggers have made such a huge difference it’s crazy,” remarked Callum. “Jordan and I were kind of blown away by how much of a difference it made.”
The guitar and bass rigs recently transitioned to Two Notes Torpedos instead of live cabs, so it’s a simple XLR out for all the stringed instruments. Within the Torpedos you can select various models of cab and move the mics around as you please. The best part is it’s exactly the same every show, it’s made life far easier and so much more consistent.
For the backing vocals two Sennheiser e935s are used, one at each keyboard stand. On Baden’s vocal, they’ve been using Shure KSM8s for years now, although they’ve tried other options the KSM8 suits his voice well and they haven’t been able to beat it!
The excellent Jordan Tanner is on monitor duties and Callum says that he owes him a lot. All of the band uses IEMs with Jordan using Shure PSM1000s and P10r receivers.
“He’s taught me so much over the years we’ve worked together and had a lot to do with my transition to DiGiCo once he opened my eyes to what they were capable of!” commented Callum. “Jordan is using an SD5 as well, the whole rig including supports is running on our consoles. We’ve got an additional SD-Rack for support patch which lives on the opto loop with the Ocean Alley SD-Rack.”
“Honestly I think it’s just the classic changes from venue to venue that cause challenges,” he added. “Everything coming off stage sounds so good now and all our sources are super clean so it is a bit of a dream gig these days.
“A personal highlight for me was Riverstage, I was really happy with that show. The Saturday night Hordern was also excellent! We sorted a bunch of issues from the Friday show and it felt great to mix a headline set in a venue I grew up going to gigs at!”
Photos: The Sauce @the.sauce
