Archive
Sennheiser Silences The O2 With The Feeling
January 2012 Issue 149
As part of last month’s December Sessions at London’s O2 Arena, UK pop quintet, the feeling, took to the event’s bespoke stage, which was set in the venue’s piazza amid its restaurants and bars. They performed an hour-long set of hits from their 2006-2011 singles collection. Paul Watson was there to take a listen, on headphones...
December Sessions ran from 4pm-9pm every day between the third and 22 of the month, encapsulating over 100 free performances from a handful of household names such as The Feeling, Irwin Sparkes (Hoosiers frontman), plus a more than healthy slice of up-and-coming UK talent including Manchester-based Nicki Garnett; London trio, Belakiss; upcoming singer Laura Steel; and Treetop Flyers, who recently won the Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition.
On arrival at the O2 a few hours before The Feeling’s headline performance on December 19, it was immediately evident that there was one major piece of gig artillery amiss: a PA system. Why? Well, this show was organised and run by Chris McCarron, Director of new company, Silentgig, who, with the help of pro-audio manufacturers, Sennheiser and Allen & Heath, staged a unique show where all audience members were handed a stereo image of the FOH mix courtesy of a set of Sennheiser RS120 wireless headphones, rather than through the conventional method of sound reinforcement. Incidentally, McCarron ran the production for all shows within the December Sessions using various crew members for each gig. Sennheiser donated additional mics.
Said McCarron: “One of my main business partners and friends, Sean ‘Rampton’ Cranny was the other main System and FOH Engineer on the December Sessions. Rampton is a very good personal friend of mine and an integral part of the Silentgig set-up.” The Lighting and Video Engineer, Michael Struan, “did a magnificent job to deal with all the content from 100 bands, mostly at the last minute,” he added. The December Sessions crew line-up was completed by Stage Managers Paul Murphy and Jim Dunbar. For The Feeling’s gig, the crew differed slightly.
I’d seen silent stages deployed at trade shows and regional festivals before, where eager (and often inebriated) punters were invited to step up and smash an electric drum kit to smithereens, thrash out a tune on a guitar, or even howl into a mic (if they were really drunk), but at a full-on gig, to hundreds of people - how do you go about creating an atmosphere, or dynamics, even? I was about to find out.
A STUDIO SESSION APPROACH
Before the band took to the stage, I discovered that The Feeling’s lead singer and guitarist, Dan Gillespie-Sells, was also going to be wearing the Sennheiser RS120’s.
“I don’t use in-ears. I try to get as close to the FOH mix as I can using wedges and whatever is going on with the PA,” he revealed. “I tend to rely very much on the sound in the room, so it’s going to be very strange; and I’ve decided that I’m just going to wear what everyone else is wearing... We’ll have to wait and see what happens!”
Bassist, Richard Jones, also chose to use the RS120’s on stage, of which Sennheiser provided 600 units in total. Meanwhile, the rest of the band were on Sennheiser’s EW300 G3 IEM systems.
The band are also big fans of Sennheiser’s mic offering. Gillespie-Sells uses a very ‘bling’ SKM 5200 (with KK105 head), and the three other vocalists use Neumann’s KMS 105 wired mics.
“It’s a difficult thing for a band that has four vocalists, because you want to have vocals at a decent level at a gig, but you want the guitars louder,” Gillespie-Sells explained.
Upon trying the Sennheiser mics, he said: “Immediately it was better; they are brighter, easier to deal with, easier to mix, and have less spill; to get the vocals up without too much bleed from the drums and guitars, you need great mics.”
The Feeling’s Sound Engineer [and Tour Manager], Jon Sword, worked from an Allen & Heath iLive-T112 mixing console at FOH position; and Monitor Engineer, Duncan Wild, worked from an iLive-T80 desk at stage right both provided by Silentgig with assistance from Allen & Heath. Sword said that when he was mixing the performance, it felt like he was working in a recording studio.
“The approach was very much like a studio session, really; mixing like this means you have ultimate separation, because there’s no noise whatsoever coming off the stage,” he explained.
“Whereas normally, it would be very difficult mixing in a closed environment: there’s no big room to hide the overspill of your cymbals, for example, and that can really manipulate the sound coming out of the loudspeakers.
“With this though, Paul [Stewart, drummer] was using a Yamaha DTX 950 electric kit which Yamaha kindly donated, and it made the job much easier. It was funny having the drums on two channels, and the signals I was getting from the guitar simulators weren’t quite the same as I normally receive from the band, but you know what, it sounded pretty good, considering.”
Sword used just 16 inputs from the iLive in total: two were used for drums (L/R); four tracks of hard drive; two for guitars; one for the bass; two for the keyboards; one for the acoustic guitar; and four for vocals, the latter of which, he said, “sounded awesome”.
“At a normal Feeling gig, we bring in our consoles, load up our show files onto our consoles, plug in, and we’re away, but we couldn’t do that here, because we basically had to start from scratch,” he said.
“To compensate for the separation, if you like, the main thing that I had to do was to treat nearly everything with effects. I pulled up certain reverbs within the iLive and found an unobtrusive and big sound so the whole mix could have a little of that on it, just to give it that room sound, rather than settling with a clean and squeaky mix.
“I also pulled up an ADT chorus effect for the BVs, which worked well,” added Sword.
EFFICIENT ENGINEERING
Sword said Freelance Engineer, Ste Pattison, who was working for Silentgig, did a particularly good job on educating him on the operation of iLive. Pattison is known for his work with Adlib Audio, but it was his time with Glasvegas last year that led to Silentgig speccing the iLive for the December Sessions.
“I’d like to give a big shout-out to Silentgig, to be honest; their engineer was extremely efficient and he made it very easy for me on the night,” he insisted. “And Phil Cummings at Sennheiser has been amazing for me over the last six or seven years. The band were well up for giving this a go for him.”
And they seemed to enjoy the experience, too. Gillespie-Sells is an excellent and endearing front man, and entertained the crowd throughout the 60-minute set, as The Feeling played hit after hit, including Fill my little World, Never be Lonely and a recently re-worked version of Rose, which is currently featured on the new Burberry advert.
As a punter, wearing headphones felt odd at the beginning, but after a few numbers, I sort of got used to it; and by the end of the set, the whole audience - and Gillespie-Sells - seemed to forget they were wearing them at all.
TOUGHEST OF CIRCUMSTANCES
Stewart summed up the band’s experience of the silent gig standing alongside Gillespie-Sells in the Green Room, after the event. “It was a bit of a challenge,” he smiled. “Dynamically, with the power of a live PA and the sheer power of a fully amplified live band, we found performing with our usual extensive dynamic range was not possible.
“All things considered though, the [Yamaha] 950 kit did a sterling job in just about the toughest of circumstances; the speed and precision of sound editing meant it adapted quickly and fully to the task at hand and resulted in a novel and very enjoyable - if entirely odd - live performance experience. If only we’d been allowed to switch on the PA, though!”
TPi
Photos by Richard Minter
