Darius Kedros first mixed Tim Minchin in 2015 for a couple of shows outside the Sydney Opera House, called ‘On The Steps’. Last year they were a little way into The BACK Tour (subtitled Old Songs, New Songs, F*** You Songs) when Covid-19 hit and it had to be cut short. A multitude of rescheduling has gone on since which is detailed in Tim Minchin Part I.
Darius says that when Tim Minchin plays with a full band he wants the show to be as big as a rock gig but he’s got a background in theatre.
“That means he’s quite different to most artists I have worked with who generally just want to play their songs, have a good sound, a strong light show, and that’s pretty much it,” commented Darius. “Tim is always thinking about the story, the message, the next joke that he’s setting up, so he thinks much more like a theatre director. There are some specific vocal effect cues that he asks for that enhance the narrative – a distorted section of a song for example, or a keyboard part that needs to be loud and proud, but beyond that he pretty much lets me get on with it, knowing that he expects the very highest standards from himself and everyone he works with, which I imagine is at least part of the reason he’s doing so well.”
The Back tour mostly visited beautiful seated theatre venues, most of which have an in-house PA system, so Darius didn’t have a free choice of PA system. It was more a case of making sure the in-house rig was going to be adequate for the show. Sometimes that meant reminding the inhouse crew that the show was a rock n roll gig, not a cabaret show, and adjusting the number of subs or adding fills where necessary.
When Darius started mixing shows in the early 90s it was all Midas large format consoles and with good reason because they sounded amazing, says Darius. When everything started to go digital he discovered that the Midas Pro series also sounded amazing except for their inbuilt reverbs, so he’d run a bunch of Lexicon plugin reverbs in his Laptop via an RME interface.
“This was a good workaround, but a year or two ago Midas started incorporating TC reverbs into their Pro X consoles, and they sound fantastic, so that’s one less thing to go wrong,” said Darius. “JPJ have a Midas Pro X pretty much just for me, which is very nice of them.”
The Tim Minchin shows feature a full band; piano, drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and a horn section, plus a whole bunch of backing vocals – everyone sings. There’s the traditional upstage backline and BV’s set up, and then for a portion of the set the band comes downstage, so there are a whole bunch of separate inputs and BV’s pop up there too. It all adds up to about 60 inputs, so managing all that requires some care and attention.
“I’m a big fan of subgroups, so all the BV’s together, all the horns together, and all the mid-range instruments together, and each of those stereo subgroups is getting a bit of compression to help hold it in line, which really helps a lot when you need to be clearly hearing every single word Tim says or sings,” explained Darius. “On the drums, I’m running parallel compression, and then there’s an L&R master bus compressor too. We got Tim on a DPA D:Facto wireless handheld mic, and it sounds really amazing, but Tim is ‘Mr Plosive’ when he’s singing, so I use a dynamic EQ to manage the low end, trying to retain warmth, whilst knocking back the worst of the plosives. It’s pretty tricky, but with the DPA mic, and the Midas Pro X dynamics I think it works pretty well.”
For the Yamaha grand piano, a combination of a pair of Audix SCX25A-PS mics over the cast iron plate holes 2 and 4, and a pair of Earthworks PM40T mounted with a pole over the hammers are used. Monitor engineer Rod Matheson also ran a single DPA 4099P to give himself some extra gain for monitors.
“The gain before feedback of the piano mics define the upper ceiling of level for the shows, and the combo of mics does sound pretty good,” added Darius. “Tim’s vocal mic is a DPA D:Facto capsule on a Shure UR2, and all the other wired vocals were Shure Beta 58s. The horns were all clip-on DPA 4099s, which sounded great. The only other thing that is slightly out of the ordinary is the kick out mic, where we use an AKG D12VR.”
Rod Matheson mixes monitors on a DiGiCo SD5 assisted by Matt Whitehead. Tim likes wedges so that he can read the room, and Jak Housden is not too fond of IEMs either, so they’re both on pairs of d&b M4 wedges, with side fill from d&b Q7/QSUBs. There are also a couple of d&b E8s as spot monitors for Tim and Jak. Everyone else was on Shure IEMs with stereo mixes, which was great as it helped keep the stage levels reasonably low, and Darius wasn’t having to battle with it at FOH.
“The biggest challenge of the job was of course Covid-19,” said Darius. “Repeated rescheduling and travel restrictions made things very challenging for us. Most of the crew live in Melbourne, and most of the band live in Sydney so that in itself made things complicated, and ultimately it was quite heartbreaking for the crew to miss a bunch of the shows.
“The shows we did were really great. I was very happy with the way it sounded, and it’s a real pleasure to work with Tim – he makes you feel valued. Tim has a great band – they’re all tasty players and lovely folks, and the dream team crew of Rod Matheson, Dugald McAndrew, Cam McKaige, and Matt Whitehead was, well…. dreamy. And lastly, shoutouts to all at JPJ who looked after us very well.”
