Due to Covid-19, Lime Cordiale had to reschedule their 14 Steps To A Better You national headline tour from October 2021 to April/May 2022.
For the past year, their FOH sound guy has been Billy Psarologos who says that he tries his best to reproduce the sound off the album, but he’s fortunate the band gives him almost complete creative control to add space and delays and all sorts of cool filters to bring life to the songs on stage.
The PA on the tour has varied a little bit, but when he can his main choice is d&b GSL.
“It’s such a true sounding PA and thanks to some clever engineering, it feels like it’s not even on when you’re standing behind the PA system,” elaborated Billy. “For me, that’s so crucial to getting a really clean live sound because no matter how loud you have it out the front, you get virtually zero PA spill back through the microphones.”
For control, Billy uses the Waves LV1 console remarking that it’s super important to him to have all the Waves associated effects because it allows him to reproduce any tricks that they’ve done in the studio, live.
“If I can’t have that for whatever reason, I use the Avid S6L with a Waves Server integrated,” he added. “As I mentioned earlier, the band allows me to do anything that comes to mind in terms of effects. I use heaps and heaps of space delays and at times I even filter the whole mix just before a chorus so that it explodes into the chorus. That’s something that you can only do if you have very low stage volume, and fortunately, the whole band is on in-ear monitors; there’s no noise on stage except for the drum kit so that gives me free rein. The other awesome thing I get to do is use a lot of distortion on Oli’s vocal, I always love doing that and it turns the heads of a lot of other engineers because it’s really difficult to achieve, but the Waves LV1 gives me all the tools to do it.”
Microphones for Oli and Louis vocals are DPA d:facto vocal microphones with Billy stating that they are hands down the most important thing in his kit, nothing reproduces vocals as truly as those microphones.
“On drums, I’ve got a bunch of different Earthworks microphones and on the all-important trombone we’re using the Sennheiser MD541 Blackfire,” he said. “Most of the other inputs on stage don’t have microphones, they’re all digital lines.”
Adam Kaye is mixing monitors on a DiGiCo SD console with the whole band on in-ears and there are no foldback speakers on stage whatsoever.
“It’s important we keep the stage volume at a minimum so that I can get away with doing all the cool filter sweeps through FOH,” said Billy. “James on the drums also has a drum stool which has a speaker inside the seat that rattles every time he hits the kick drum; it gives the impression of having a big sub behind you without actually having all the noise the sub would create – that’s important for our big clean drum sound.”
Billy says that the biggest challenge is dealing with all the content and choosing which instrument is going to feature in which song.
“There are so many parts in Lime Cordiale songs and they can’t all be at the forefront of the mix otherwise it’s just messy, so making those decisions when the keys feature or when the guitars feature or when the trombone features, is probably the most difficult part for me,” he said. “The other thing that I find difficult is trying to do so many effects and also keep my head up and watch the show, often Louis runs out in front of the PA and I need to be on the ball to ensure it doesn’t feedback.”
According to Billy, all the shows so far from the 14 Steps to a Better You tour have been incredible, with an amazing core production team with Rob Charles on lighting and Ken Weston nailing the visuals every night.
“Our production manager Jade Harbord and tour manager Haydn Johnston gave us the platform to nail our show, not once was I worried about anything other than mixing the band,” concluded Billy.
