Macy Gray has been touring Australia in celebration of the 25th anniversary of her successful debut album ‘On How Life Is’.
Steve Swift was the local Production Manager/Tour Manager for Showtime Production and David Hawkins was the AU tour promoter.
FOH engineer Winston Rathbun has been with Macy since 2014 and also acts as her production manager and runs video too. He’s happy enough to be mixing on house consoles although naturally he has his preferences and on this tour, he has been treated to three different brands of console. At The Enmore in Sydney, he was running an Allen & Heath D-Live for the first time.
“It was kind of easy and nice to just start over fresh, have a simple show, good room, good PA, and just go back to basics getting something nice going,” he said. “But I think if we continue with a full 48 plus channels, we’ll probably have to start carrying consoles.”
The tour does try to keep as much consistency as possible within budget and reason. They carry all of their RF package, IEMs and wireless mics for Macy as well as DIs. Everybody else has the standard mics and they try to just kind of stick to that.
“So it’s not too bad going from venue to venue, but more consistency would make our lives a little easier,” Winston commented. “Macy is on the Shure Axient wireless system, but we use the sE V7 on her now. We were just using standard Shure SM58 and Beta 58 for a long time but with how soft she is, the V7 gets us a little bit more gain. The isolation has been nice, but she kind of moves around a lot and isn’t always directly on top of the mic, so I do have to compensate for that a little bit. Overall, it’s helped clean up the whole mix.”
For mixing, Winston favours a DiGiCo SD12 saying that it is very simple to navigate and mix on, it’s widely available, and it’s always easy to get a good sounding mix on Digico consoles. However, he discovered that he quite liked the D-Live he was using that day saying they might spec it as part of their control package the next time they’re able to.
Winston says his main challenge when mixing this show is keeping Macy’s vocal on top although the sE V7 mic has helped with that.
“There’s less effect on cupping the mic and she does kind of hang on it,” he added. “Being on different consoles, I don’t always have time to create scenes and snapshots, and so I’m adjusting on the fly to keyboard patches. The way we run tracks is our percussion player has everything loaded into an SPD and multi-output through there so we have six mono lines that he’s triggering. Macy doesn’t always stick to a timeline so that’s why he has to trigger things on the fly. However, with all of that, it’s more difficult to go in and edit the tracks and make sure they’re all consistent. So it’s just a lot of memorizing my cues and knowing when to compensate for everything that we haven’t had time to flesh out.”
Effects-wise, the show is fairly simple. Macy asks for a dry sound, she doesn’t like any reverb on the band. Winston says it’s pretty simple from that perspective, especially having to dial it in every day. But he has plenty of show files for different consoles, so it’s not that difficult these days.
It’s not often the FOH engineer also has to take care of the video. Winston was given a bunch of individual clips that a regular VJ would run. He aimed to have a simplified setup and, after going through iterations of QLab and just pressing the spacebar in between songs, he decided on a small Resolume setup and a MIDI controller.
“I have a button for each video clip, which essentially is just a background loop, and then lighting can follow that,” he explained. “Since we don’t tour with an LD either, it helps them define the looks on the fly. I just have a couple of faders so I can bring up her standard logo and then go back into the background video. It hasn’t been too bad this tour although sometimes it’s a lot to start wrangling everything, especially if there are problems. But I think right now, having smoothed it out a bit, it’s been quite easy and comfortable.”
Mixing monitors on an Allen& Heath D-Live 5000 was Ash Balgobind with Alex Lebowitz looking after the backline.
Macy does not like IEMs and is surrounded on stage by large wedges. The rest of the band utilizes Shure PSM1000 IEMs.
“It’s a four-piece band plus Macy and sometimes it’s hard to listen to what the band listen to in the in-ears and what Macy is getting from the monitors,” remarked Ash. “So that’s why it’s good we have Alex as, most of the time, he’s listening to all the talkback mics, so if the musician wants anything on the ears, he’s like, yo Alex, I want this. And then Alex runs to me and is like, hey, I need more keys or I need more that. Because most of the time I listen to Macy’s monitor and he has everything on his in-ear. Is it a challenge but it’s OK.
“I think the thing I search for most is consistency on her monitors. And that’s the reverb because she likes a lot of reverb. The stage is often a challenge for us because Macy doesn’t sing that loud and we have a drummer and percussion player who are loud on stage.”
Ash particularly liked The Enmore saying it had good monitors, good mics, a good crew, a good stage and a good PA – so pretty good all around!
