When the Human League decided to tour Australia and New Zealand, the budget did not allow for their long-serving FOH engineer Kevin Pruce to accompany them. Not a problem said their manager, I’ll do it!
Hush your collective groan … the band’s manager, Simon Watson, has decades of audio experience behind him although he readily admits to being very rusty on the newer gear.
From running mobile discos at the age of seventeen, then working with local punk bands in the late 70s and running a small audio company in the early 80s Simon’s career as a sound engineer snowballed. He then moved on to production and tour management and became a manager in the late 80’s.
ALIA caught up with him at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre, which venue Simon chose for the band over the State Theatre as he cannot tolerate the State’s no-dancing policy.
“However, I’d forgotten what a terrible mix position it is in the Enmore” he commented. “There are no infills under the balcony, most theatres have a little array there, so it’s very muffled back here and it’s a real bass trap.”
Although it’s been forty years since Simon mixed FOH for a living he has dabbled when necessary or when he felt so inclined. In the past year, he has stood in on a couple of previous Human League gigs as well as a few for another of his clients, the American singer Belinda Carlisle. Before that, it was six years since he last mixed anyone and that was on an AVID Profile, a console he says was easy to use, at least by comparison to more modern digital consoles.
“The DiGiCo is just so complex,” he lamented. “It’s great, it’s powerful, it sounds much better than the Profile, but setting it up is complicated as hell. Last year I went to DiGiCo with Kevin and he showed me the basics of these things, but I’m standing on his shoulders anyway because the show file I’ve got is based on his file. The thing with this band is everything is electronic and everything is different every song. Every kick drum is different, every snare drum is different, every hi-hat is different and every bass sample and keyboard sound is different.
“The bass comes out of any one of four different places. The keys come out of any one of about a dozen. And the dynamics are interesting because some of the samples, some of the sounds we’re using are the original sounds from the albums and what isn’t has been recreated to sound as close as possible to the record. Consequently, the changes can be huge between songs, so it’s just a question of trying to even those things out. Then you’ve got all the Waves stuff to deal with, which is never straightforward. Giving me a digital mixing desk is a bit like giving a monkey a typewriter. The monkey will eventually write War and Peace, but it’s going to take quite a while!”
Simon remarks that as he is not immersed in that audio world, it’s important not to try and get too clever. If you do, you can all too easily trip yourself up.
“Someone like Kevin, or the other guys who work for me, they’d come in here, fire up their Smaart and spend hours dialling in the system to get it exactly how they want it,” he said. “I don’t have the ability or the time to do that. So I rarely mess with what the house has done as I work on the assumption that they’re in here every day, so hopefully they know what works in this room and they’ll get it close. I sometimes do a little tweaking, I’ve taken some frequencies out of here today that I thought were a little bit overly emphasized but that’s just on my ear. Obviously, the good thing for me is there’s probably no one in this audience tonight who can hear anything above 12k! If there was an audience of teenagers in here, they’d probably be running around with blood coming out of their ears.”
Simon runs quite a few plug-ins including a Waves F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ, which he describes as a very powerful bit of kit, a Waves H-Comp Hybrid Compressor Plugin, a Waves H-Reverb Hybrid Reverb Plugin, a PSE, a Waves C6 Multiband Compressor and a few other bits and bobs.
Microphones are mainly trusty Shure SM58s and whilst they use their own Sennheiser IEMs in the UK, they didn’t bring them to Australia because of the frequencies and the freight costs, opting for local Shure IEMs instead. Monitor engineer Tom Maddox ran his show on a Digico SD10.
“If you stand at the back of our stage during a show, you can pretty much have a normal conversation,” added Simon. “We’ve got no amplifiers on stage, no acoustic instruments and everybody’s on ears. Plus the tops of the side fills are unplugged, we’re just using the subs to move some air. So the stage is incredibly quiet and that’s one of the great things about mixing this band, nothing is bleeding down any of your vocal microphones. I do use a primary source expander on the lead vocal though, just in case.”
Simon notes that in the old pre-digital days you mixed with your ears only, whereas nowadays you mix with your ears and your eyes. “
“But then at least you don’t have to keep looking away from the console to look at the compressors, the noise gates and so on,” he concluded.
ei Productions are supplying an audio touring package and crew for their current Australian dates taking in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. This includes the DiGiCo SD12/96 at FOH with an SD10 on monitors with an SD rack on a shared Opto Loop, as well as two Waves packages.
Added to that are the Shure PSM1000 IEM Systems, Shure UR wireless and the package is all complete with a 56ch Multipin Patch System with multipin Stage Line System.
