Mark Seymour and The Undertow
Live at the Gershwin Room in the Late Covidian Era, 13th June 2020
This gig was organised by the Mushroom Group and Melbourne Public, as part of the ‘Back To The Local’ series, for a performance in the Gershwin Room in the Esplanade Hotel, the grand old dame of the St Kilda pub scene.
There were a maximum of twenty people allowed as a seated audience, in accordance with the current rules, and the show live streamed to a ticketed audience. It was great to get back to work, and back in the Espy, where the band hadn’t worked for many years. Having the Ghost of Alfred Felton upstairs bar as a band room was not too shabby either, and eating non home-cooked food, supplied by the Espy kitchen, for the first time in months was almost a novelty.
The system in the Gersh has been many things over the years, but it’s now quite a nice little rig. The Digico SD9 house console is located centrally about two thirds back in the room, which is a change from the last time I was there, when it was on the stage left side of the room, just forward of the fire exit door, in front of the first delay hang. The Gershwin room has always been difficult to manage for SPL, due to the first room almost acting like a proscenium, with sound reflecting back on to stage. There are now six sends of FOH, main hangs and first delay hangs of L’acoustic ARCs with SB218 subs, and a second delay of L-Acoustic X12s mounted on the walls back near FOH. Joel Cairns is the Production Manager for the Espy, and he is all over the gig. Scott Clarke from the Espy was our generous host, and CUB were sponsors.
Tables were set in the front room only, so the soundcheck plan was to not run any delays at all, and back the subs under the stage off 3dB. By the time the punters were in, distancing the tables meant there were half a dozen people in the main room, so we dialled in some level to the first delays. I’ve done a lot of Undertow shows in theatres over the last few years, and we do a fair amount of corporate work too, so the band’s stage levels are very under control. Our standard monitoring setup is frontline wedges for Cameron McKenzie (electric guitar), Mark Seymour (acoustic guitar), and John Favaro (bass) with wired IEMs for the drummer Peter Mazlin, so the in-house Quest wedges were ample. Stage gear was artist supplied, to cut down on variables as much as possible, and because it’s our home town. Stan Armstrong made the trip down from his bush hideaway to stage manage, (nice of course for him to see his old school chum Alfred Felton’s place of residence again.)
All the frontline players sing, and we bring our own Neumann KMS105 vocal mics, which I’ve been using most of this century. Most of the rest of the mics I also supply, basically all the Sennheiser 900 series. Joel and I discussed the future of house mics after soundcheck, concluding that house mics for vocals will be a thing of the past post-Covid, probably not before time! The use for festivals will be interesting, given the need to tune monitors to mics, unless they’re all on ears. We agreed that bands will need to have matching mics for all singers in their group, to minimise the variables over sends, and not lead to making already combustible festival monitor guys completely self-immolate.
Lighting was in-house and the Espy LD was Jake “Dutchy” Bylsma. The plan was for a normal dynamic rock light show, rather than a completely static set-up, sometimes favoured for streamed events. The streaming was organised and operated by Jason Rooney from Eventcraft. He planned the event well and set-up in the Gersh on the Friday to test run his set-up. We decided the best approach for audio was to take my FOH mix unaltered, and augment it with a pair of audience mics under Jason’s control, faded up between songs for audience ambience, monitored in headphones. Jason was set-up in front of the bar just behind the punter’s tables, with the main camera (Canon 5D4) on a tripod next to the laptop and external video monitor. Other cameras were Blackmagic and GoPro, also tripod mounted.
The performance went well, the band happy to give some of the new songs from the just-released ‘Slow Dawn’ record their first run. I took a few pics as usual from FOH using my Canon 5D mark iii, although I didn’t like not having the best camera at the gig, so I’m upgrading to a 5D4 this week!
https://www.facebook.com/RobertMilesDesign/
Audio Technical Specs
Console: Digico SD9 – 8 in / 8 out local (Core 2 V 9.1.1090) Digico MADI rack – 52 in / 24 out Connected via MADI core Outputs 1-6: wedges 7: Drum fill 23/24: PA L/R
FOH: 6 x L-Acoustic ARC’s wide/focus 2-way speaker (main hang) 4 x L-Acoustic ARC’s wide 2-way speaker (1st delay) 2 x L-Acoustic X12 speaker (2nd delay) 4 x L-Acoustic SB218 sub (2x under stage, 2x under 1st delay)
Amps: 4 x L-Acoustic LA8 4chl amplifier
Multicore: 4 x 12ch 7m sub box 40 x 7m Mic leads
Monitors/Stage
Console: Monitors from FOH console
Monitors: 12 x Quest QM12MP wedge 2 x Quest QM600S Sub
Processors: 8in/8out processor Configured for 6 x sends of QM12MP, 1 x 2 way send of QM12MP over QM600S
Amps: 2 x 10,000Q 4chl amplifier
Microphones: 6 x Shure B58A 4 x Shure SM57 3 x Sennhieser e614 5 x Sennhieser e604 1 x Sennhieser e902 1 x Sennhieser e901 6 x Radial DI
