Mixing Beyoncé

Despite the combined obstacles of the Great British weather, an unreliable tube service and over-efficient security personnel, I finally made it to loading gate 8 of London’s O2 Arena at the ungodly hour of 7.00am.

    My last steps were halted by a health and safety marshall, who promptly slapped a blue hard hat on my head with the instruction: “Don’t remove it, until the red lights are off.”

    I made this early start to observe a full working day in the world of Beyoncé Knowles’ crew as they hit London as part of the superstar’s I Am... world tour. Specifically, I was here to get the story behind the singer’s live sound and am advised, “just look for the camouflage trousers”, as I searched for my guide du jour, system engineer and audio crew chief, Mike Allison.

    “Welcome to the real face of live music,” said Allison, tripping over a cable — and not for the first time in his career. His route into the business is a familiar one. He played bass at high school, attended classes in stage craft, and soon found himself helping out with the lighting and sound systems for local bands and the odd ‘name’ who came to town.

    By the age of 24, Allison had moved to Phoenix, Arizona and started his own lighting and sound company, Desert Plains, named after his favourite Judas Priest track.

    “The company lasted for five years,” said Allison, now 52. “We did the local bar and club scene, and were the ‘go to’ guys for all the punk bands like the Dead Kennedys.”

    Joining Dallas-based Showco in 1986, Allison built an impressive client list and when Clair Brothers Audio (this tour’s supplier) bought Showco in 2000, the Texan stayed on, and is still with the rental giant today, working with the likes of the Rolling Stones, George Michael, Richard Marx and Santana, and since 2001 he’s been a regular on Bon Jovi tours.

    Back at the O2, Allison supervised the flying of the two 32-cabinet main stage PA hangs with the local riggers. “On this tour we’ve been using the old curved Showco Prism speakers. They’ve got low frequency beam control — FIR flat phase crossovers using DSP platforms with a sub-bass spatial integration and pre-emphasis comb filters.”

    The system was driven by a mix of Crown Macro-tech 3600 and Powersoft amplifiers. On both the main and B-stage, Allison and his team used eight Clair SRM monitors, each capable of delivering 131db, with eight smaller FF2-R monitors, positioned at the front of the main stage.

BEACHED
One of Allison’s first tasks was to lay down the power cables and connections from stage left — referred to by the crew as ‘monitor beach’ due to the extended row of racks it houses — to  FOH.

    Within ‘monitor beach’ there were two 96-channel Digidesign Profile consoles — operated by Ramon Morales (Beyoncé’s engineer) and James Berry (band engineer) — and a trio of video monitors that enabled good vision of the on-stage action for the crew.

    Beyoncé’s FOH sound engineer, Horace G. Ward arrived to set up his own Digidesign Profile, the smaller version of the Venue D-Show that he was consulted on during its R&D process.

    Brought up in Birmingham, England, Ward was an early member of reggae band Steel Pulse, but soon found himself moving more into sound mixing.

    “I would stand behind the sound guys when the band was playing, watching what they were doing,” he recalled. “At one gig I started giving some advice to one of them. He just turned around to me and said, ‘you bloody do it then, I’m off to the bar’, so I did!”

    After a long spell in studios, Ward joined R&B star Keith Sweat’s touring team as production manager and worked with Mary J. Blige, amongst others.

    Although Ward relies on his natural hearing and experience to tailor his system daily, one of the few handy tools aiding him is the Metric Halo Spectrafoo 3F17 program for the Mac.

    The program contains a number of high resolution metering tools in both stand-alone and DAW plug-in configurations, including a basic, sample-accurate metering, triggerable waveform display, and phase analysis on any number of input or output channels.

    By laying down a curve, based on the acoustics of the venue, Ward then produces a second curve based on the sound through the PA. The trick, he explained, is to “get the second curve to match the first one as much as possible, then you know you have the best sound for that arena.”

    Ward’s Profile was packed with “excellent” effects plug-ins: “I have an MSP ML4000 compressor/limiter which has two other plug-ins included within it — an ML1 mastering limiter and a ML4 multi-band expander and compressor — which allow me to add more compression if the high end is clashing. You still need that depth and speed on the high end.”

    Beyoncé sang through a Sennheiser SKM 5200 handheld mic with an MD 5235 capsule, as did her three BVs. Initially, she used the Neumann KK 104 capsule. Then, said Ward, “Sennheiser came out with the 5235 capsule and that was it!”

    Ward applied minimal EQ. “It’s pretty smooth. All I do is roll off a high-pass at 200Hz and dip 200Hz on the console channel about 5dB, because she has unusual power in the low range of her voice.”

    Monitor man, James Berry reported that the wireless systems include 16 channels of Sennheiser’s new EM 3732 receiver, with a combination of SKM 5200 wireless handheld and SK 5212 ultra-miniature bodypack transmitters.

    The band, singers, dancers and production crew all benefit from 19 channels of evolution wireless G2 personal monitor systems. A multi-channel Sennheiser NET 1 frequency management rig controlled from laptop computers co-ordinates the RF set-up.
   
VISUAL CHARACTER
Recently completed after nearly a year out, Beyoncé’s I Am... world tour, featured Suga Mama, her 10-piece, all-female band, The Mamas, her BV trio, plus dancers.

    At the O2, it was interesting to hear Ward explain how a show’s visual character influences his mix. “For me, sound is not just what you hear, but what you see and feel — clarity of the audio affects the clarity of the vision and vice versa.

    “If the musician I’m mixing on stage is not covered with good lighting, it will affect the way I mix them, and in turn if my mix is not clear then Pat Brannon, our lighting designer will have trouble getting the right lighting on that player, that’s why I always try to mix for visuals and feeling as well as for sound.”

    Another area that the New York-based engineer is passionate about is how his mix affects the audience: “The low end can often be set in a way that feels uncomfortable within your body. I use the crowd as my bass trap, so it’s easier for me to create a low end that kind of gives the body a warm, rather than heavy, feel.”

    This point attracted an affirmative nod from Mike Allison: “If the audience go home at the end of the show and enjoyed it more because of the quality of the sound, then we’ve done our job. In a way they should not even be aware of the sound or the system hanging up there.”

    With the audience coming to “hear the album” as Ward put it, there are some sounds that just can’t be replicated in a live situation “unless you’ve got 50 musicians on-stage” so some pre-recorded loops “enhance the individual tracks, so they replicate the album — everything else is live.”

    Mike Allison is currently in the United States, working on Bon Jovi’s The Circle world tour.
TPi