For the first time ever, live music thundered from Auckland’s Eden Park stadium when a crowd of 50,000 concert-goers attended the closing of the Six60 Saturdays country-wide tour
Mixing front of house was Chris Tate, who has been with the band for approximately five years, and all things audio were provided by College Hill Productions.
“The band has quite a few albums and EP’s under their belt now, they have worked with many producers and consequently have a range of timbres and interesting sounds,” Chris elaborated. “They also like to change things up a bit when they rehearse a new tour and it’s often quite refreshing to see what they come up with.”
Six60 shows have a lot of theatrical gags and at this show, they had a Kapa Haka group, a guest band (DRAX project) playing on stage with SIX60 for a song, dancers and the Royal New Zealand Navy band played with the band for two songs. Matiu’s brother also made a guest appearance singing his single ‘Not My Neighbour’ and the band basically became a session band for one song which was cool.
“Generally, we sit at rehearsals and the band says ‘we wanna try doing this’ and then we try and make it happen and I figure out a way of presenting the audio side of things to sound good live,” said Chris. “They like to spend a lot of time in front of the PA in the middle of the field!”
The gig posed several more challenges for Chris especially as it wasn’t possible to get subs and side hangs exactly where they wanted them due to weight limitations.
“Our PA legs each had to hold up an additional 1.5 tons of screen,” added Chris. “However, our system designer and system tech Johny Keirle, who is a complete perfectionist and consummate professional, spent much time in the pouring rain doing what a perfectionist does, saving my bacon! Also challenging is mixing a show from well over 200m away and so timecode is your friend … note to self, next time bring opera glasses or a telescope.”
Presenting everything live seamlessly usually involves quite a bit of wireless gear with Chris saying that they use dual set-ups and Radial 8 way switchers to get good wireless coverage and the IEM stuff was switched using wireless workbench. This time around, they had a (VERY) close mic’d drum kit that had to appear on a stage 50m into the field, disappear and then re-appear again further into the bands set. They ran this off a second stage rack located under the B stage which also was home to the duplicated wireless gear.
“All of the band’s instruments terminate at a rack on stage and go into AXE FX units as well as DI’s so that I can re-amp as necessary,” explained Chris. “We also triggered some album kick and snare samples for a few of the songs.”
An L-Acoustics PA was chosen comprising of L/R 24 x K1 and 8 x K1-SB, LL/RR 32 x K2, 40 x SB28 subs and delays of 44 x V-DOSC in four hangs with end fire SB218s ground stacked. Fills were 12 x dV-DOSC and 8 x ARCS. The system was driven with LA8 amplification controlled with LA-NET and a P1.
“I chose to use L-Acoustics product because I will always choose it when given the choice,” stated Chris. “Its pattern control is second to none, this to me, is important for two reasons: as much of the crowd as humanly possible should hear as close to the same thing I’m hearing as possible and secondly, the band puts on a show that is very good visually. Using L-Acoustics product allows us to get a good result – the main PA was actually three metres upstage of the drum riser for all the other shows on this tour.”
For control, Chris used a Soundcraft VI7000, a UAD Live rack and a UAD Apollo X8. He also had a couple of MOTU’s that he used as LTC/MTC convertors and an RME MADIFACE.
“I use the Soundcraft because I LOVE the interface, it’s one of only a few consoles that you can work easily on lots of things at once (just like you used to be able to do with analogue gear),” he said. “Also, the automation workflow is logical … I’ve been using Vistonics consoles for years and the VI7000 brings all the best things about digital, such as total repeatability, and analogue’s tactile interface.”
FX wise, Chris used the UAD Liverack running on a MAC for inserts, drums got two stereo busses of Neve 88RS and a dbx160 and the instrument and backing vocal busses got Neve Buss comps. The lead vocal got a Pultec, an 1176 blue stripe, an LA2A and a UAD de-sser. Bass got an API Vision strip and a dbx160 whilst the master got a Manley Massive Passive, a Shadow Hills Mastering comp, an Oxford inflator and an Oxford Limiter.
“The Apollo was used in conjunction with a second MAC running, three instances of Lexicon 480L, an Eventide 910, an EMT250 plate and a couple of amp sims for guitars,” added Chris. “This MAC also took care of drum samples and was fed into the console via an RME MADIface.
“I like the UAD stuff because I grew up turning real dials and to me, the UAD stuff reacts as the real thing did – they model circuit diagrams so the units distort and react like the real thing when you push them. Also, UAD bought quite a few of the algorithms from manufacturers for things like reverbs etc. You can make the red light come on on an AMS for instance, and the combination of algorithm and circuit diagram modelling gets you a pretty uncanny non-lin snare sound. A third MAC was used as a recorder and patched via DANTE.
“Lots of the songs in the set were back to back with an on the beat downbeat into the next song and getting that exactly right when you’re so far away from the stage can be nerve-wracking so, for me automating and letting timecode do that stuff for me was great and let me concentrate on mixing. Having all your reverbs and amp sims be able to change at exactly the right part of the song is brilliant.”
Mic set up:
Kick mics: Shure Beta91a + AKG D12VR
Snares: Shure Beta57s
Hats: Shure SM81
Toms: Shure SM98s
Gong: Sennheiser MD421
Overheads: AKG C414, lots of countryman and Radial DIs
Vocals: Shure UHF-R with Beta58a caps
Instrument wireless: UHF-R with packs and jacks
Catwalk Drums: UHF-R with packs and SM98s
Hapa Haka: UHF-R with packs and DPA headsets
B Stage Kit: same as main stage kit but with close mic’d cymbals
All band radio stuff had duplicate receivers, one rack at monitors and one under the B stage in the middle of the field, and Radial mix switchers were used to switch between the two systems and everything was networked together using Wireless workbench.
David O’Brien mixed the band’s monitors using a DiGiCo SD7 and ran Shure PSM1000 systems for the IEM setup. The band are all on JH ears and, in addition, four L-Acoustics 112Ps were truss mounted for fills and eight d&b M2s were used.
The band uses IEM exclusively for the show with two sets of Shure PSM1000 systems on helical antennas. The second system was located under the B stage. The transmitters were switched between songs during the show using wireless Workbench via a stream deck.
“Dave was also in charge of what I like to refer to as the ‘North Shore telephone exchange’,” revealed Chris. “I think there were at least a dozen chat mics and everything also got patched into a sizeable Clearcom Freespeak system with about 30 packs on it that production set up for show call and site stuff.”
All the wedges and fills were for dancers and performers to hear what was going on and as a backup in case anything went wrong with the IEM gear.
In addition, the main drum riser got an L-Acoustics dV-Sub and the drum throne got a Porter and Davies shaker.
Chris reports that everything worked without a hitch on the night and says that the night was humbling and he feels very lucky and privileged to work on this show and this tour with an amazing bunch of people, at a time when most of the world is locked down.
