Legendary audio guru Howard Page returned to Australia mixing FOH for Sting, one of the few musicians who can lure him back into touring.
“Like me, Sting is a workaholic and even at my age, he won’t let me go,” laughed Howard.
The tour began in February 2022 and Howard says he didn’t get home until the end of November due to a large number of makeup shows from Covid cancellations. Hopefully, this leg of the tour won’t keep him away from his role as Senior Director of Engineering at Clair Global in Lititz, Pennsylvania, USA, for such a length of time.
At Clair Global Howard is involved with the final design process of all of the Clair systems, tuning and commissioning how they sound. His extensive career mixing in the real world is invaluable to the company and occasionally he is sent out on tours to ‘fix up’ the sound. Usually, according to Howard, it’s horrendous, with over-the-top bass and audio levels ridiculously high!
During Covid, Clair Global seized the opportunity to buy up a lot of companies all over the world whose owners had had enough, making them a mighty conglomerate in the audio production world.
“We bought most of our competitors in England, Switzerland and Germany and of course, we bought JPJ Audio upon the demise of Eric Robinson,” remarked Howard. “When you buy a sound company, you’re buying market share but we keep these companies as entities as they would have already built up a relationship with key artists. This also helps in terms of equipment consolidation because when you buy a sound company, none of the connectors matches, none of the speakers are the same and so on. You can spend an absolute fortune on making them all work as one so we didn’t.”
A confessed perfectionist, Howard will look at his audience and ask himself ‘what do they expect from the sound in this show’ – with Sting, the audience wants to hear him sound exactly like his recordings.
“Sting’s audience is a unique demographic of older people who have stuck with him for 30 years,” he said. “As a FOH engineer, you’re in a very powerful position sitting in from of a state-of-the-art sound system and you need to be very conscious that you are not here to please yourself but rather the audience. That is the art and science of live sound, giving the audience what they perceive it should sound like.”
Console
At Sydney’s Aware Super Theatre, Howard was running a Yamaha Rivage PM5 console which is a big departure from the Studer Vista 5 live console he used for twelve years prior.
“I was involved in the design of the Studer Vista 5 console but due to some circumstances after Covid, I could no longer use that console,” commented Howard. “It was a wonderful console but after 12 years it had run its course. When I decided to change to the Yamaha Rivage, I did a lot of research and one of the things you always need to have when you tour as hard as Sting does is absolute and utter reliability which the Yamaha Rivage Series delivers.”
Howard adds that the Yamaha Rivage Series sounds astonishing and measures incredible. Whenever Clair Global invests in a new console they will put it through rigorous testing and he says that the Yamaha Rivage measures as good, if not slightly better, than his flagship Studer Vista 5.
“The Yamaha Rivage PM5 console does everything I need and as well as sounding great and reliability, I needed a console that was portable which this model is,” said Howard. “We do some bizarre shows around the world with Sting where I have to hand carry all my FOH equipment.
“I use all the internal effects processing that the console has with no external processing at all, as I don’t need it for Sting, and I use the latest DSP-RX-EX engine that drives the console”.
When touring with Sting, Howard doesn’t always have a Clair sound system, particularly at festivals, so he carries two Lake LM44 loudspeaker management units that he feeds digitally from the console.
“I then ‘break’ the sound system up into all of its sections – the mains, side hangs, sub bass, front fills, out fills – and when I feed the system like that, I effectively take it over and have control of whatever that system is,” he explained. “It becomes my sound system that I can manipulate, delay, tune and optimize to suit the way I want it for Sting.”
Howard also utilised CueController, a program he designed himself that has a programmable set list that can be adapted for each show from Sting’s master song list. It also drives his archive stereo recorders so that when Howard hits ‘record’ it adds the track number, the name of the song, where it was recorded and the date.
“When I change the next song, it sends MIDI program changes to the console which controls all of the effects returns only,” added Howard. “I mix the show manually, there’s only one scene that I use that is a master scene that recalls the whole console so I use that scene as the reference starting point for each show.”
As well as making a digital stereo recording of the console mix, Howard also records using Logic Pro X so he has a 64-track recorder coming through Dante straight off every channel of the console. He also adds a FOH microphone and two microphones off the stage for the audience so if in the future, Sting wanted to make a live album they have every show individually tracked.
Howard has the latest version of Smaart to assist him in tuning and optimizing the system. He sets it up to have a reference for the FFT as a mono out of the console.
“The FFT is a comparison program with offset delays, so I’m comparing what the mic that is close to my ears is hearing to what is coming out of the console,” he said. “If I’m getting a pretty flat line I am producing out of the sound system what I’m putting out of the console. It’s a method of linear transfer but it involves very detailed system tuning and optimization.”
Read Part II of the interview later this week.
