Extreme

January 2009 Issue 113

The recently-reformed American guitar rock band completed their 2008 European Tour in November at London’s Astoria, with a pair of iLive digital desks controlling their powerful sound.

Fronted by lead singer Gary Cherone, and featuring guitar hero Nuno Bettencourt, bassist Pat Badger and drummer Kevin Figueiredo, Extreme have been enjoying revived fortunes of late, after a long ‘rest period’ between 1996 and 2004, during which Cherone notably joined Van Halen.

    Their first album in 13 years, Saudades de Rock, contains some of Extreme’s best work and has returned them to the forefront of the guitar rock world.

    TPi caught the band live on November 24 at London’s Astoria — the climax of their European tour — where they gave a blinding performance to a loyal fan base (and Led Zep’s Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones), following an impressive opening set by ex-Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins’ new outfit, Hot Leg.

    With the Charing Cross Road venue soon to be pulled down to make way for the new Crossrail, this was one our last opportunities to remind ourselves of its raw qualities, and on this occasion it certainly lived up to its legend.

    Extreme’s European tour was virtually ‘production-free’ in its reliance on in-house sound and lighting at each venue, with the exception of the last handful of dates for which Capital Sound and Bandit Lites provided some supplementary systems.

    For the most part, the equipment travelling with the crew amounted to just an Avolites lighting desk for LD Martin Favorite and the Allen & Heath iLive digital consoles for FOH and monitor mixes that have specified been worldwide for the tour.

    Monitor engineer and Extreme production manager Jay Phebus’ experience with Allen & Heath began with the GL2400 on King’s X — his relationship with the audio brand was forged by local Ohio rep, Rob Joseph.

    “It was suggested that I move over to iLive when I toured with [blues guitar giant] Joe Bonamassa and that was good timing because I’d been looking to go digital, and the results couldn’t have worked out better,” said Phebus.

    “I’d already done a Steve Vai tour with a Yamaha DM2000 which seemed complicated. I thought there had to be a better way.

    “Once I saw iLive it was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into creating a digital product that was truly user-friendly. I threw myself into it and realised it was a whole different ball game.”

    FOH engineer Joe Brown had mixed for Nuno Bettencourt’s most recent bands and was brought on to the Extreme tour as an extension of his successful working with the guitarist. Brown has assumed that they would use resident desks wherever they played on the U.S. leg, especially for the House Of Blues-type venues.

    Like Phebus, Brown had previously worked on other digital desks, but it was the monitor engineer who opened Brown’s eyes — and ears — to iLive.

    “Jay put me in front of this desk in rehearsals and I figured it out in no time,” said Brown. “I was a little apprehensive at first because I’d never seen an iLive desk before. But to demonstrate just how powerful a tool it is, Jay asked me for my input list and before I’d finished a soundcheck, everything was in the desk and ready to go. I was dumbfounded and it was obvious I had to go the same route and have my own iLive at FOH permanently.”

    Phebus uses an iLive-80 on monitors, while Brown mixes on the larger iLive-112. In the States, the desks were provided by Allen & Heath’s U.S. distributor, American Music & Sound. Just ahead of the European leg, A&H product manager Léon Phillips was asked to extend the support by supplying identical consoles and stage racks from his training stock.

    “I was e-mailed the show files and made sure that each desk was loaded with all the mix settings, effects and dynamics, ready for the first gig — straight in with no rehearsals,” said Phillips. “They simply carried on from where they left off in the States.”

    “It doesn’t get any easier than this,” added Phebus, over a pre-show fish’n’chips supper, around the corner from the Astoria.

    “With iLive, I’m already mixing when other engineers on other desks would still be scrambling around. That means I get more time to work on fine-tuning and it’s very relaxed. Any analogue-driven engineer can walk up to to this desk and make it happen very quickly. If you can’t, you’re in the wrong profession.”

    Passing the vinegar, Brown said: “I find it really easy to tune a system with the iLive’s graphic EQ display both during the set-up and on the fly, during the show. There’s no bending over or turning to a rack of outboard — it’s all right there at your fingertips.”
   
ON-STAGE RACKS
iLive’s DSP is housed in the Mix Rack, providing minimum latency and giving the user the chance to custom configure the desk. For Extreme’s shows, both the FOH and monitor racks were positioned on stage to facilitate easier splitting. Phebus controlled 16 channels of monitor inputs although he also had full access to the 25 run at FOH.

    Both desks were also used to mix Hot Leg — engineered at FOH by former Darkness mixer Andy Shillito — and the opening French support band, The Duvals.

    “iLive’s got an insert function that was very useful for Hot Leg,” said Phebus. “Although the DSP in the desk is excellent, some people have a piece of outboard that they just won’t give up and that’s the case with Andy Shillito who carries a BSS DPR-901 four-band dynamic EQ with him to smooth out Justin Hawkins’ vocal.”

    The Extreme entourage also included band manager Rob Hoffman, tour manager Bob Dallas, stage manager and drum technician Yogi Garcia and guitar/bass tech Thom Termini. After the European dates, Extreme headed out to Asia for shows in Japan, Korea and Indonesia before returning to the States at the end of the year.

TPi
Photography by Mark Cunningham,
Gabe Whyel & Léon Phillips