THEATRE OF DREAMS

Musical theatre is an interesting audio discipline. There can be similarities to a touring pop/rock act. But there are also plenty in common with dramatic theatre. Traditionally you have performers wearing omnidirectional lavalier mics in their hairline, without any vocal foldback, singing along to a live band which is normally in the orchestra pit in front of the stage.

With technology improvements, sound designers like Peter Hylensky have been able to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Intelligibility has improved, SPLs in the house have been pushed harder, improved stage monitoring is possible, headworn mics and transmitter packs have got smaller, battery tech is better, and a lot more is possible with creative routing to loudspeaker systems and surround setups.

The Australian Moulin Rouge! sound design represents the absolute state of the art when tech rehearsals started in 2021. The big-ticket items include a huge complement of Meyer Sound loudspeakers and Galileo Galaxy processors; dozens of channels of Sennheiser Digital 6000 wireless; and a fully-maxed Digico Quantum 7 mixing console.

AudioTechnology met with System Sound production sound engineer, Chris Pratt, and sound associate David Greasley at the Regent Theatre in downtown Melbourne to get a closer look at the technology that makes the show tick.

MIXING THE SHOW

So what’s it like mixing a full-throttle musical theatre show like Moulin Rouge! ?

Chris Pratt: “Intense. The first 20 minutes, especially, are absolutely relentless. There’s a lot of manual mixing of the main vocals and getting the band balance just right. I’ll also be hitting sound effects. Some of the effects are linked to visual cues so they can’t all be trigged by QLab. You need to know the show to get it right. And, being theatre, you’re not going to get the exact same performance every night – you need to stay alert. If you miss a cue, then there’s nowhere to hide — everyone will know about it.”

As you can imagine, the show is heavily snapshotted.

Chris Pratt: “The snapshots will be changing band mix assignment on your DCAs; changing reverb sends; making EQ changes, that sort of thing. The automation may be rebalancing the ensemble for you as a starting point but it’s not changing anything to do with principal vocal levels, those are always mixed manually.”

With 30+ wireless mics, dozens of band inputs, Ableton tracks, sound effects and more, there are plenty of inputs to wrangle:

“We’re full. We run a Digico Quantum 7 with an EX-007 sidecar for front of house, connected to a couple of SD racks, a SD-Nano Rack and SD-Mini Rack backstage — and they’re all full. We’re also running an Orange Box and an Optocore DD4MR. So that’s how we get all of our inputs into our system. The Quantum 7 has been upgraded to 32-bit internal processing. But we run analogue copper to the Meyer Sound Galileo Galaxy processors. We have 11 of those which are themselves interconnected via AVB – effectively turning them into one huge crosspoint matrix – which routes audio to our Meyer Sound distributed sound system.”

LEOPARD COVERS ALL SPOTS

Musical theatre has always been a law unto itself with panning, routing and surrounds. In the past, an entirely parallel vocal system might be a feature. Ultimately, the idea has always been about doing whatever’s necessary to improve vocal intelligibility, which is tough when performers are whispering into gained-up omni mics or bellowing into each other’s lavs during a showstopper duet.

Moulin Rouge! works with a true distributed loudspeaker design. Fundamentally, the aim is to get the best, most suitable loudspeaker as near to the relevant section of the audience as possible.

Leading the charge is an array of Meyer Sound Leopard each side, 14 deep, with eight Meyer Sound 900-LFCs in a cardioid configuration flown beside it. If Moulin Rouge! was a touring pop act, this rig would probably all you need (with a bit of underbalcony fill). But Peter Hylensky’s design goes much much further. There are Meyer Sound point sources loudspeakers providing centre channel coverage, delay and fill to the whole 2500-seat theatre.

David Greasley: “I think we’ve got the whole Meyer Sound catalogue on this show! 28 Leopards, 20 x 900-LFCs [plus Chris Pratt’s personal sub! – Ed.], and a couple of 1100-LFCs. I don’t even know how many MM-4XPs… 34, I believe, mostly in the stage. We’ve got a lot of UPJuniors… there must be at least 30 of them. Then there are lot from the Meyer Sound UPM range: -2Ps, -1Ps, UPM-1s, UPM-1XPs plus UPQ-D1, -D2s and -D3s. A couple of the ULTRA-X40s… We’ve even got a few of the old MSL-4 from the ’90s, which still sound amazing! Then the surround system is the E6 and E8 from d&b.”

Chris Pratt: “The design is based around Leopard because that’s the best-sounding array box of that size. The same applies to the 900-LFC. It sounds fantastic. Running them in cardioid gives us an exceptionally even sound through the house. The other Meyer Sound point source loudspeakers were all chosen to provide the very best coverage for every seat in the house.”

David Greasley: “The UPQ loudspeakers and the MSL-4s are used to progressively keep a high-powered full-range box in the centre, and that feeds all the way through the room in order to get that full-range centre sound the show needs to maintain a hifi sound. It’s tightly plotted such that each speaker hands over at the 6dB-down points, again, to keep it smooth through the room so every person has the same experience.

“Being a distributed system, it doesn’t shift around – it’s one large cohesive audio experience.”

Chris Pratt: “And because we have so many speakers in the room, it’s very responsive to fader moves. Nothing’s running too hard, and nothing’s near its limit. You have full clarity as you push up and down in the room. If you push the master fader by 1 or 2dB you can really hear it.”

ROUTING & LOCALISATION

There’s no stereo bus out of the mixing console. The band mix is fundamentally mono and level-only. Special effects can be routed to particular loudspeakers. Vocals are treated differently. Every effort is made to place lead vocalists’ audio in the right spot, matching their stage position. There are 10 possible on-stage zones that help the audience localise the performer to their stage position. Which is all to say, Chris Pratt doesn’t use ‘panning’ to localise performers as they strut the stage, instead the localisation is performed using delay between loudspeakers, otherwise known as the Haas effect, and something theatre has been employing for a long time.

There are 30+ outputs from the console feeding the Meyer Sound Galileo Galaxy processors. The Galileo Galaxys themselves act as a crosspoint matrix for the vocals – any vocal source to any output. During the painstaking loudspeaker tuning process, the audio team set up microphones in the room and put a source loudspeaker in one of the 10 on-stage zones, then time every send of the loudspeaker system to the source. Rinse and repeat 10 times (up/down stage and left/right).

Given the show is heavily staged, the audio localisation of performers is automated, there’s no need for IR trackers or the like.

“The localisation of vocals is important for this show,” remarked Chris Pratt. “Given it’s high energy, it allows the audience to more easily connect with performers especially when there are multiple vocalists.”

STAGE MONITORING

If the loudspeaker routing seems crazy-intricate and involved, then the on-stage monitoring isn’t far behind.

First up, you’ll very rarely find in-ear monitoring on a musical theatre stage. The sense is that audience connection is everything and performers are loath to do anything that might undermine that and the interactions between fellow performers.

That said, performers still benefit from hearing vocal foldback so they can pitch properly.

But any foldback needs to be heard but not seen. Not only that, any unnecessarily stage spill will decrease intelligibility in the house mix – don’t forget, performers are using omnidirectional headworn mics, not hypercardioid handheld mics, and pick up everything.

So, you guessed it, Moulin Rouge! features one of the world’s most sophisticated foldback setups.

Concealed beneath a grille under the feet of the performers are rows of miniature Meyer Sound MM-4XP loudspeakers – six each in the first three rows and four each in the back two rows, 26 in all. Part of the snapshot automation sees foldback being routed to the correct combination of underfloor loudspeakers depending on the position of the principals and whether they’re actively singing.

Performers on the stage thrust in front of the proscenium aren’t forgotten. There are another six Meyer Sound MM-4XP.

For complete coverage, performance ladders flown on/off stage have additional sidefill-style monitors – Meyer Sound UPJuniors. And for performers side of stage, there are additional monitors. Finally, certain set pieces rolled on/off stage have monitoring onboard. Given they’re unattached, those speakers are battery powered and accept their monitor send via a wireless pack. Phew.

WIGGING OUT: WIRELESS

Musical theatre has a voracious appetite for wireless headset mics. Every performer with a singing or speaking part gets one, and it’s good practice for principal performers to wear a backup. Traditionally, the audio department would work with the wigs and wardrobe departments to place a lav mic in the hairline of the performer then run the cable underneath the costume to a well-concealed pack.

Peter Hylensky’s audio design opts for headset mics instead of hairline mics. Although the frequency response from a hairline mic is remarkably good, you’re still twice as far from the source (the mouth) than a headset mic. But headset mics have disadvantages. They’re visible and they’re hard to get a perfect fit, especially when the performer is dancing.

Peter Hylensky’s answer was to get every performer individually fitted with a bespoke headset. Each headset is made from titanium (light, strong and hypo-allergenic) and fitted high on the back of the head and over both ears. The boom extends about half way to the performer’s mouth and camouflaged to blend in with the tones of the makeup. Courtney Weaver was appointed wireless guru and oversaw all this.

Sennheiser’s MKE1 capsule was specified thanks to its diminutive form factor and its natural response. Ditto the Sennheiser 6121 transmitter pack, which is small enough to be clipped in under the women’s wigs, meaning one less cable to worry about, especially if there are costume changes.

David Greasley: “We have 38 channels of Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 Series wireless. We use the 6212 belt packs which are waterproof, which is great – previously we’d need to wrap packs in latex in order to stop sweat getting in.”

Chris Pratt: “The other thing that really saves us time is the battery life on the latest generation of wireless. We can now go a full day of technical rehearsals or a full double show day without changing batteries. It might not sound like a big deal but previously, during changeovers, when everyone else was getting a break, we’d be laboriously swapping out batteries on all the packs. Now we get a break.”

David Greasley: “The titanium headsets are great. They’re a perfect fit and don’t move. We spend a lot of time getting the distance to the mouth just right so we don’t get any breath noise while still getting maximum vocal output. So once we’ve finessed that, it’s a real advantage knowing that capsule is in the exact same spot every night.”

Chris Pratt: “Location to the mouth is a massive thing. With a boom headset, it can make a huge difference up front for intelligibility and the amount of gain you can get. It means that I’m able to mix that vocal above the band in those big moments – and there are plenty of big moments in this show. In fact, we need to hear every syllable without the breath noise.”

David Greasley: “The Sennheiser MKE1 is super-compact but it’s also such a good-sounding microphone. The principals wear two boom mics so they can’t afford to be obtrusive, but you can’t sacrifice clarity.”

Chris Pratt: “The MKE1 provides that clarity without any artificial boost in the frequency response. You’re not fighting against some kinda baked-in boost.”

David Greasley: “Combine that with the solid clarity in the high end you get from the 6000 series and it’s just so strong. It’s a solid system.”

BIG, BAWDY & BEAUTIFUL

Moulin Rouge! is big, bawdy and loud, but its success hinges on ensuring the audience hangs on for the roller coaster ride. Unlike a Les Mis or a Phantom of the Opera or even a Wicked, Moulin Rouge! doesn’t rely on traditional musical theatre principles, such as recurring musical themes. Instead, the songs are already radio favourites, known to all in the audience and are often coming hard in mashed-up medleys.

David Greasley: “Dynamic range is really important but it’s not just dynamic range that we’re giving audiences. We’re giving them the story and we’re giving them the pop songs; we’re giving them the hooks, and a lot of the music in the show. We’re not playing the same recurring song from throughout, in fact, we might be doing four different songs in quick succession or even two songs at once. So whenever there’s a change in the music, the audience needs to know straight away. We need to have that full-range HF experience in each seat in order to be able to get that message across.”

Clearly it’s doing it rather well. It’s rare to witness an audio design that doesn’t routinely accept compromises. Every technical challenge is addressed with an ingenuous technical solution. The result is an exceptional experience for audiences.

Moulin Rouge® is a registered trademark of Moulin Rouge. 

ARTIST LED

The 360 immersive push was entirely Bjork’s. d&b’s Soundscape has been around a few years now and has experienced some success. There are a good number of installed Soundscape systems in Australia alone, including in the Sydney Opera House, City Recital Hall, and the Mackay Arts Centre. Soundscape concert touring systems are rarer. The production overhead is steeper. Arguably not as steep as you might think but, regardless, steeper. So for a tour to go ‘immersive’, it can’t be initiated by the sound people, it needs to come from management, and even more influentially, the artist or band. 

For d&b’s part, Soundscape is about as well-integrated into its normal workflow as possible. There are some specialised tools, such as the object localisation software (En-Scene), the spatialisation software (En-Space), and more recently the snapshot cueing software (En-Snap), but Soundscape is designed to be easy for anyone familiar with d&b’s ArrayCalc to apprehend. d&b has demonstrated this with a ‘sandbox’ system at Womad for a few years, inviting FOH engineers to ‘have a go’, to great acclaim and success. The integration of Soundscape into regular d&b workflow was certainly appreciated by the tour’s System Engineer, Jack Blenckinsopp: “From a system tech point of view, the tools you’ve got within ArrayCalc and within R1 make the whole process more efficient — you get to where the artist wants the show to be really quickly. En-Snap, En-Space and En-Scene all play nicely together and give you the panning and spatialisation flexibility you need, along with the Soundscape tab in ArrayCalc, which allows you to place an object and simulate the system, giving you confidence not only in the coverage of the system but that the audience will get the full effect of Soundscape.”

SPATIAL THOUGHT BUBBLE

When Bjork expressed interest in ‘surround’ to realise her new Cornucopia production back in 2019, it was still only a thought bubble: “She initially wondered about having a couple of loudspeakers at the rear, but I knew we could do better than that,” recalls front of house engineer, John Gale. 

John set about researching the various immersive systems on the market: “d&b demo’ed a Soundscape system for me in a church in London. I brought in the Pro Tools multitracks from the Utopia album and we messed around for a while and I concluded that Soundscape had all the elements I thought I would need to be able to build a show. My main concerns were around scalability — would the system adapt to different types and sizes of venues — and accommodating a second, immersive, delay system — allowing audiences in the back end of a large venue to have the same immersive experience. In my view, at that time, Soundscape ticked all the boxes better than the competition.”

LIGHTHOUSE MOMENT

The next step was to get Bjork involved. A mini Soundscape system was shipped to Bjork’s lighthouse-based studio, for some pre production tests — hard to think of a better environment for 360-immersive experimentation than a lighthouse!

The test rig helped to light the touchpaper of Bjork’s imagination and the system scaled as Cornucopia’s momentum increased: from Lighthouse to recording studio to a movie sound stage for production rehearsals, each time with an incrementally larger Soundscape system to accommodate Bjork’s evolving vision for the production and the number of musicians involved.

The production then debuted at The Shed, New York — a new ~1500-cap venue — where it enjoyed a residency, allowing John and the team to settle into a groove.

SNAP HAPPY

Come show time, John Gale presides over a monster rig, comprising 56 channels of playback, all automated and panned to within an inch of their lives. The snapshot automation (triggering the immersive mix positions within Soundscape) is a grab-bag combo of automation within Pro Tools (using a Soundscape plug-in), the industry favourite Q-Lab and the new d&b badged En-Snap (developed by Broadway West End designer, Gareth Owen).

On top of that are the various live elements, including the seven aforementioned flautists, percussionists, clarinetists, choir, harpist, drummer, and Bjork herself. All up there are some 160 inputs to wrangle — a total that’s set to expand when Bjork brings Cornucopia back to Iceland for a celebratory homecoming.

The extra inputs were as good an excuse as any for John to upgrade his console to a SD7 Quantum: “I originally started out on a Digico SD12 when we were doing the Utopia tour, but we outgrew it and upgraded to an SD7. The eventual move to the Quantum was largely because we were doing full virtual soundchecks every night, and with over 160 inputs coming into the console we needed the Quantum to handle the three MADI streams. I have an RME MADIfaceXT combined with my laptop sending that to my desk. It’s such a luxury to listen back to a show in that way. Bjork will very often stand with me at front of house and listen. She’ll have comments, she’ll even get hands-on and ask me which fader a certain sound is on so she can fine tune levels.

“I’ve been using Digico consoles for 20 years and the Quantum gives me everything I need. Having dynamic EQ and multiband compression on every channel is very handy. Every song has at least one snapshot and most songs are timecoded. I have effects running in the board, but I also have effects running in Pro Tools — I route from the board into Pro Tools and through the actual effects from the album then back into the console via MADI.”

MIXING WITH OBJECTS

The DS100 is the brains of Soundscape’s object-based mixing system. When John Gale started his Soundscape journey, he was taking stems from the Utopia album’s Pro Tools sessions, turning them into objects and panning/placing them in the 360 field. 

Initially, after John took a multi-track stem and turned it into a Soundscape object, he would route that signal to a direct out of the console and into the 64×64 DS100 processor. But after a few weeks of experimentation, he started again and routed each object to its own group, “that way I’m not chewing through the 64-object limit too quickly. Some objects will remain in the mix throughout the show and will be labelled as such — Bjork’s vocal, or Flute 1, for example — while other objects may make a brief appearance and can be assigned to ‘Miscellaneous Group 1’, and can share that group with other objects at another point.

“This approach also allows me to be more responsive. If Bjork asks me to take a sound out of a stereo stem and turn it into an object, I can quickly take it, make it mono, assign it to, say, Misc Group 5, and pan it in the immersive field while she’s standing next to me without messing around.” 

UNLEARNING YOUR LEFT & RIGHT

Sound people often talk about how the hard-won rules of mixing are upended when they start mixing on an immersive system. I wondered if that was John’s experience.

John Gale: “Transitioning from stereo mixing to immersive mixing can be disorienting. You unlearn a few things. The headroom of a system like this Cornucopia system is deceptively high. I’m running the show at around 92dB and you definitely perceive it as louder. You have more loudspeaker arrays across the front (seven, in total) and then the surround loudspeakers, so you don’t ask as much of each loudspeaker, which I think contributes to the effortless feeling you get mixing with an immersive system like this Soundscape rig. One of the first things you dispense with is bus compression. With object-based mixing and the bigger mix canvas you can let things breathe more.”

EN-SPACE EN POINTE

Initially, most people think about radical panning — objects flying around the room like a Marvel fight scene. But probably the most powerful aspect of an immersive system like Soundscape is its ability to place performers in space — matching their position on stage; left, right; up or down stage.

It’s amazing how grateful your brain is to hear a performance emanate from its position on stage. 

The d&b DS100 engine handles the routing, timing, level, acoustics, and third party integration. It takes a remarkable amount of processing to ensure a performance sounds like the PA’s not switched on!

The opening of Cornucopia is a case in point. The choir of some 18 performers file out and range across half the width of the stage. Each performer wears a headset mic but the performance itself sounds like an au naturale recital in an acoustically finessed theatre. Close your eyes and you can point to individual performers across the stage. It’s really quite remarkable.

“The choir is all totally done in En-Space,” explains John Gale. “I don’t need another reverb, the algorithm in the d&b DS100 is phenomenal. With the choir, I think most people wouldn’t know there’s an artificial reverb being used — it sounds totally natural and transparent. The d&b reverbs are second to none. Combine that with loudspeakers that you know are fantastic and it gives me total reassurance that the audience is getting the best possible experience.”

HERE’S TO THE VISIONARIES

Thank goodness for the musical iconoclasts, like Bjork. If it was up to the major labels we’d all be fed a saccharine diet of Pepsi Music Lab pop tarts. Bjork’s Cornucopia might be bonkers, but it’s gripping, and the Soundscape immersive audio system is up to the challenge set down by the artist.

Everyone references Pink Floyd when you talk about immersive and how it’s ‘not a new thing’ (debuted in 1967, if you can believe it). But it’s also worth remembering that no one can reference another artist mad enough to attempt live sound ‘surround’ in any meaningful way for another 40-plus years. Technology has finally caught up and now is the moment for innovative artists and producers to let their imaginations run wild. Just like Bjork.

CALCULATING MATHEMATICS

This Ed Sheeran ‘Mathematics’ tour is very different to the last. The tour plays to stadiums in an in-the-round configuration. The cable-tensioned staging is an engineering marvel, carefully balanced to use the audio, lighting and video equipment as counterbalancing weights (the central LED screens weighs in at 45 tonne). If you’ve ever seen someone pulling up a model ship in a bottle then you get something of the idea — only, this ‘ship’ is life size and the ‘bottle’ is the size of the MCG!

The biggest concert tour in the world requires the biggest production spec. The headline number is 212 x Meyer Sound Panther elements… 212! There are many, many 1100-LFC subs, as you can imagine. There are 314 speaker cabinets in total, including a couple of Meyer Sound’s ULTRA-X40 monitors at front of house, which Chris Marsh relies on if it’s raining and the FOH tent is fully covered.

PRODUCTION ED ACHES

The audio challenge is obvious and immense. How do you provide audiences with a good concert experience in a venue that’s probably never experienced one? The MCG is a graveyard for audio. It’s an enormous, cavernous bowl and if you’re in-the-round, the artist is at the centre of the mayhem, being annihilated by all the reflections. The MCG spent millions on upgrading its in-house audio a few years ago, and it may be the envy of the world for the intelligibility of PA announcements, but no one’s pretending it’s a top-draw concert venue.

During soundcheck, the acoustic thwack of the snare drum said it all. The first reflection off the grandstand is fiendishly removed from the direct sound.

Thankfully, some 110,000 people help to tame the acoustics but present a bunch of their own issues. System engineer, Charlie Albin, outlines the challenge and how to measure success:

“After the first song is completed and it feels like things are settled into some sort of a rhythm, I’ll go and listen to the PA at various vantage points in the venue.

“I’ll head to the top seats and listen to the PA and make an assessment on the frequency coverage. I might make some gentle tonal shifts, slight tweaks.

“Often it’s a question of: is there enough clarity in the mix? Can they hear Ed’s vocal clearly? Can they get enough musicality from the guitar for them to enjoy the experience?

“Maybe we’re not hearing quite enough intelligibility in the vocal. So do we want to pull a bit of low-mids out, which arguably could make the mix a touch less musical but we gain diction and clarity?

“Finding the right balance is everything. The show is all about Ed and people want to be able to sing along; they want to laugh at the jokes; and when he says, ‘Put your hands in the air’ Ed wants everyone involved in the show.

“As audio engineers, we’re naturally hypercritical of the sound and our work, but I think the best marker for any show, is to go sit in what I would suspect is the worst seat and see what the people around me are doing. And if they’re smiling, clapping, singing along and laughing when the artist says something on stage, then to me that’s a really good indication that we’ve delivered a great show.”

HEAR KITTY KITTY

Meyer Sound’s Panther and the Ed Sheeran tour are joined at the hip. The first 200+ boxes off the production line went straight to the tour’s first day in Dublin, mid 2022, and front of house engineer Chris Marsh consulted with John and Helen Meyer on the design: “Prior to the tour I mentioned to John and Helen that as much as I love their Leo system I would have to look at another vendor’s solution because the staging wouldn’t allow for Leo’s weight. Their answer was: ‘stick with us, we’re working on something that we think will do the trick. From that point onwards, we got heavily involved with the development of Panther. And it’s no coincidence that Panther ended up being the perfect box for this show!”

Panther’s launch promise was a heavyweight 150dB maximum output from a bantamweight 150-pound (68kg) enclosure. It’s a two-way system with many ‘ground-up’ innovations to shoehorn extreme performance into a compact enclosure.

One of the first questions Charlie Albin and Chris Marsh get is: ‘which do they prefer? Leo or Panther’? The answer is honest: they’ve never heard Panther in an arena in a ‘stereo’ configuration, while they’ve never heard Leo in a stadium, in the round.

But there’s no doubt in Charlie Albin’s mind that Panther is a step forward: “Other than Panther being a shade lower in terms of outright SPL on axis, it more or less supersedes Leo in every other way — weight, power consumption and more.

“One of the most impressive aspects of the new Panther design is the horn. The long-throw horn is the incredibly consistent — tonally there’s next to no discernible shift from on axis to off axis, until you get to the edge of the horn’s coverage and then it drops off very, very quickly.

“That aspect makes designing a system easier: just have the arrays overlap at the seam and you know you’ve got excellent coverage for every seat.

“Panther’s long throw horn is a true 80° horizontal coverage, whereas Leo’s is 75° or thereabouts. So it means we can cover more of the venue with fewer arrays and, as well as being a smaller, lighter box, we require fewer trucks, and reduced transport needs.”

Getting the Mathematics production trucked and shipped is, as you can imagine, a logistical challenge. There are now three identical stages that leap frog across the world, which get united with technical production site to site. Fun fact: staging ballast (steel plates) concealed under each of the pylons weigh around 60 tonnes per pylon.

COPPER TO CAT

The Mathematics tour sees an enormous deployment of Milan digital audio. Milan is the result of the AVnu alliance of PA manufacturers (initially) seeking to share an interoperable audio-over-IP protocol that would (among other features) guarantee arrival times to ensure phase coherent sound — something especially crucial when you’ve got long hangs of loudspeakers. The protocol uses AVB as its basis.

It means that the audio is digital from the desk (although the Digico Quantum 7 didn’t have a AVB card to natively talk Milan at the time the tour went out) via AES3 to the FOH Galaxy processor and, thereafter, Milan AVB all the way to the back of each loudspeaker via 20 x Luminex 26i Gigacore network switches in a star topology. In fact, audio from Ed’s mic (Sennheiser System 6000 via AES3) to loudspeaker is entirely digital!

“I’m not a networking guy,” confirms Charlie Albin. “But the way Milan is integrated into the Meyer Galaxy processor makes networking accessible to non-network people. The control software is really straightforward.

“Using Milan, and the way we’ve designed the system, increases our resilience as well. A show-stop fault is unthinkable for a gig like this, and Milan provides us with more options to design in network redundancy, such that if a connector goes wrong or a switch goes down we have options.

“On top of that, we have an entirely analogue backstop as well if the network fails.”

What does Charlie say to detractors who remain suspicious of using IT gear for a show?

“I think we idealise analogue. I’m a long-time analogue audio and copper cable user but all that comes with faults, indeed, show-stopping faults, as well. But we feel better about it because we are more familiar with how to fault find and how to fix an intermittent copper line.

“The advantage of a system like AVB/Milan is being able to design in network redundancy, so you can work around any issue that might come up, as it happens, and not wait until after the show.”

STRIKING UP THE BAND

Another striking difference in the Mathematics tour is the addition of a band joining Ed. That said, the bulk of the show remains firmly steered by Ed’s vocal, guitar work and his mastery of the loop pedal.

Chris Marsh: “Ed’s loop pedal setup has evolved considerably this time around. We now have five of them on stage all wirelessly controlled by Ed. I now have more loop pedal channels than ever before — I’ve now got about 16 loop pedal channels on top of his vocal.

“Ed generally carries his vocal mic because he runs around the stage, singing over his loops. But we also have a secondary microphone for him and a spare microphone and a further spare to grab and use — all the wireless is Sennheiser System 6000. The same goes for his loop pedal: there are multiple positions for his loop microphones, which he uses to loop his vocals.

“Everything’s dealt with by my trusty Digico Quantum 7. At each of the band positions, each under a structural mast, we have a Digico SD rack for the musician’s to plug into — four positions in total. The loop pedal is an Orange device picking up MADI and there’s an SD rack for all the RF under the stage and the front of house. We’ve got a Mini SD rack dealing with my local elements, including any tracks from Logic.

MIXING MONITORS

Front of house engineer, Chris Marsh, is accustomed to tending to all of Ed Sheeran’s audio needs, including giving him a monitor mix. Nothing has changed in that regard on the Mathematics tour, even though a five-piece band has been added and joins Ed for some of the program.

Chris Marsh: “I continue to mix monitors for Ed and now mix monitors for the band. Sounds like a daunting task to most people, but actually, with this band and with this artist, it really isn’t — it’s just workflow management. The musicians are amazing and know the deal — get your monitor mix right during soundcheck.

“That said, early on I introduced the Klang monitoring system to allow the band an element of individual control over their own mix. We got a fair way through the rehearsal period and they got rid of that control but we retained Klang. Everything has a 360°, immersive feel with Klang, which the musicians appreciate even if they don’t know it’s happening. It helped them to be quickly involved in the mix and happy with their monitors.

“Mixing Ed’s monitors is low maintenance as well. If he ever has a problem, there’s a switch mic on stage where he can shout to me.”

IN EAR EVOLUTION

You might reasonably call Ed Sheeran the world’s most popular busker, given that’s his background, always been his MO, and how he develops a rapport with the crowd — even a stadium crowd. So it’s not a surprise that Ed didn’t immediately take to in-ear monitors, like a duck to water.

Chris Marsh: “In the 11 years I’ve been mixing Ed Sheeran, we’ve gone from using two wedges on stage to four wedges, to adding sidefills with lots of sub bass for him to feel it, to a point where we did a show one day where the audience was so loud that we couldn’t get the wedges and sidefills loud enough to hear himself. After that show he said he’d try in-ear monitors. But then for years he’d only have one earpiece in. He didn’t like feeling enclosed in his head; he liked to be with the audience.

“When we designed this show to be in the round, I had to break it to him that there was no way possible to have wedges on the rotating stage, let alone sidefills. So we were going to have to go to both ears. I introduced Klang at that point and I wanted to make him feel like he didn’t have his ears in — I wanted him to feel like he had the audience right there all the time, and Klang has enabled me to do that. Now he does keep his ears in for probably 90% of the show and is very happy with the setup.”

Interestingly, given the brutal nature of stadium acoustics, Chris has done away with crowd mics for Ed’s in-ear mix. Being in the middle of a giant colosseum every night ensures there’s plenty enough crowd coming down his Sennheiser vocal mic without dedicated crowd mics. As for the Klang system, Ed now can’t live without it.

Chris Marsh: “Again, Ed doesn’t even know about the Klang element — he doesn’t know he’s got it. But he does know when he doesn’t have it, which happened not so long ago at a small show where we were forced to return to stereo ears. At the end of the show, he pulled me aside: ‘I don’t know what was different, but I didn’t like it.’ Of course, the next show, when we were back to our own setup, it was back to normal and Ed was happy.

PANTHER PROWL

Chris Marsh talks about mixing an Ed Sheeran show in stadiums as the challenge of balancing compromises. The stadium is doing everything it can to turn your mix into indecipherable slop, and you need all your wits and all the tools at your disposal to bring order to chaos.

Chris Marsh: “Regardless of the act, mixing in a stadium in the round is about as challenging as you can get. You’ve got reflections coming from from everywhere but, equally, every stadium has its own characteristics. One stadium might be especially dreadful for sub bass — it’s just impossible to get it tight and it just wallows around all the time. At that point you have to decide whether you sacrifice some low-end impact in the show for the benefit of clarity — not my preference, there’s a balancing act there. Another stadium might be especially vicious on the vocals, with reflections impacting on intelligibility. Do you decide to mix a little bit louder to battle it out with the first reflection, or do you make the unpopular move of turning the overall level down and find a point where the clarity comes back. You just have to be willing to adapt your mix all the time to suit what you’re hearing.”

HELLO DUBLIN!

The addition of Meyer Sound’s new Panther system has been a key factor in helping Chris Marsh go into battle with the world’s stadiums. As mentioned, Meyer Sound debuted Panther on the Mathematics tour, which sounds like a marketing masterstroke. The reality was a little more ‘seat of the pants’ than that.

Chris Marsh: “I heard Panther for the first time in the stadium in Dublin on our opening date of the tour. Actually, it’s scarier than that: the first time I heard Ed’s live vocal through Panther was when he appeared on stage and said, ‘Hello, Dublin!’. So that was nerve wracking. But I do recall at the time reaching for the output fader of my nearfield X40s believing that they were still on, and they were not. Listening to Panther for the first time, everything was was right in front of me; it felt like it was near field. Mathematics is largely run in mono, but we do run in stereo to a point, and I could hear stereo imagery, which I wasn’t expecting given the front of house position, under a large hang of loudspeakers and with a mast and other staging between me and the inner ring of Panther.”

Charlie Albin picks up the story of that dramatic first night of the tour in Dublin. “We got some great feedback after the first show. Our team who’d been all around the venue, metering and comparing SPL levels, told me that we were within 1 to 2dB difference from the front row to the back seat of the grandstand. That’s phenomenal. We’ve never previously been able to achieve such a consistent coverage of that venue in that way.”