March 18th, 2010
Now I’ve not previously been a big fan of the opera it’s never done anything to excite me but this show Kathrine Jenkins Show is Brilliant! Kathiene is such a talant and the band are fantastic, but what do you expect from such a group of pro’s. I’m here looking after PlayBack, Keyboards and Wireless Comms and Motorolas.
The playback system has been supplied by Production Audio Solutions and comprises of two Mackie SDR’s with the control coming from G-type, along with the tried and tested green button on the MD’s keyboard. For the producion Period I had a ProTools HD Accel system to run the Logic and ProTools session from, there were a lot of changes happening all the time constantly adding or moving bits around the place it was great not to be waiting for the old progress bar for a change. I think at one point I had the band rehearsing off the Mackie’s editing some overdubs on the ProTools system and making some sound effects on my laptop, it was great it’s been a while since I have been so busy yet got such a kick out of it all. One thing to remember though, you can’t play stereo interleaved files out of Digidesign hardware.
As mentioned in addition to my previous responsibilitys on similar tours Production Audio Solutions supplied the motorolas for back to back comunication during the day and tied into the comms on a half duplex channel for the show. To compliment this there are 4 sets of Riedel’s Actobat digital full duplex dual channel wireless comms for the stage carpenters again this was all linked togerther and tied to the PRG provided ClearCom system. Every one is able to talk to whom ever the need when ever the want, brilliant. I’ve had really great feed back from the team regarding the equipment Producion Audio Soloutions have provided so I hope we will be doing the same again soon.
The team on this have been really great, it’s a few faces from old and a few new ones, we’ve been really lucky as we’ve been two shows on and one show off repeated for three weeks, so we’ve had some good R&R between shows. The tour has only been on the road 3 weeks it’s been a bit shorter than average, but who know hopefully it will rear its head again soon.
Tags: Arena Tour, Katherine Jenkins, Keyboards, Midi, Playback
Posted in Audio | 2 Comments »
March 18th, 2010
Aside from being a bit too busy and occupied and then tiared to put updates on here. I left the Nolans tour early in the capable hands of Mr Nic Gray as I had to go off and PE the We Will Rock You move from Bristol to Edinburgh. This went fairly well I do like the Edinburgh Play House. The Fitup from our point of view went well even if our truck did turn up considerably later than advertised. I had to make a return trip as Brian and Roger were to play the Edinburgh Press Night.
After a thankfully dry Saturday at Norwich’s Earlham Park doing the PA for the fireworks with a nice big hang of Mayer Mica. I heded down to Autograph to help my old mate PJ with the re-working of the Saturday Night Fever we put into Madrid at the beginning of 2009. It was coming out of Madrid and going out on Spanish tour, however all the kit had come back to Autograph to tuned into a easy to move quick tour. I enede up going out to Valencia for a week to help PJ fit up the first venue with the Spanish Show Crew who were to tour it.
After a few days at home I went off to the NEC for a job with Delta for Toyota, their Dealer Managers conference, an intresting couple of days. Then well that was pretty much Christmas! The first year my daughter of nearly 2½ was starting to excited by it all.
Between Christmas and New Year there was a bit of a lastminute.com gig of pulling in some cables and reterminating some other things at Jeff Waynes’ Olliewood Studios as they have now replaced the Digidesign ProControl with a D-Control ES.
Most of January was taken up with We Will Rock You out of Edinburgh and into O2 Dublin also knows as The Point, in addition to the kit we had on the tour we had some Martin W8L’s and W8LS form Capitol the O2 was considerably bigger than anywhere else the tour had played. It took Toby and my self a few days of prepping bits down at Autograph and a couple of extra days in the arena to get it all ready. The opening night was not great, what with Electrics tripping their incoming power supply during the second number and then us haivng the D5t12 crash during the second half. Not a great moment to be gathered around the Front of House Area. Nor for the poor company manager who had to go on stage and with no control of the PA system try and convey information to the 6000 plus people sat in the arena. It was all tracked down to a corupt desk file, Thankfully it was posible to roll back to the Edinburgh show and rebuild a lot of the changes from memory.
Febuary had me down at the Adeplhi Theatre in the West End with the other usual suspects from Autograph putting in Andrew Lloyd Webbers’ Love Never Dies. Lots of Mayer speakers, an SD7 and a SD7 Extension at front of house and a SD8 sorting all the monitor sends out in the sub stage. Though I was mainly involved with cabeling up the pit as most of the other work had already been done.
During this month I was also back at the What’s on Stage awards with Mr Ben Harison not quite as raucus as last year but still a good event and a lot of famous faces there.
Right now I am out on the Katherine Jenkins Tour, where I am looking after keyboards and playback and the wireless comms.
Tags: Digidesign, Katherine Jenkins, Love Never Dies, Nolans, Norwich Sparks in the Park, Olliwood Studios, We WIll Rock You, What's On Stage Awards
Posted in Audio | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010
I have had many trusty years service from my original Mbox along with various versions of Protools LE starting with 5 on my G3 iBook back in something like 2003. Moving up to version 6 then 7 and moving across to my G4 PowerBook was fairly painless. However withmoving over to my MacBookPro 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo I’m a bit stuck as I’ running Snow Leopard. Version 7 pont blank refuses to work, so it looks like a upgrade to ProTools LE 8.03 is inorder as this supports 10.6. However my trusty Mbox is no longer support regardless of the fact that it’s a prefectly good piece of kit in full working order and never missed a beat. A very sad time as the new Mbox2’s are much bigger in form, not so good for throwing in your bag. So it’s time to say fairwell to my Mbox or to ProTools, £300+ later at digital villavge and I’d got the Mbox2 on it’s way.
Had I known quite what a polarver getting it installed was going to be it would have almost been worth keeping my Mbox and PowerBook. So I tried to install it, I didn’t have sufficient priverlages to install it in my regular account so I logged into my admin user account still wouldn’t install. Hmmm so I did repair permissions and tried again, still no dice. So after much hutting arround a lot of the forums the soloution seemed to be the following.
You need to create a new fresh user account with admin priverlages and install ProTools there. Once that is all donw you can delete that user account. Not very Pro if you ask me however it’s now in and running, eve if It did take about two hours longer than it should.
Tags: MacBookPro, ProTools
Posted in Audio | 1 Comment »
January 6th, 2010
So I have been really busy juggling lots of different things and then at home enjoying the festive period at home so soon I promise will be a update in a more detailed way than my twitter posts about all that has been going on.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 26th, 2009
Here we are about half way through the Nolan Sisters in the mood again tour, and what a journey it’s been, having opened in Nottingham Royal Center’s Concert hall, spent two days doing the DVD shoot at Manchester Apollo, didn’t know how to deal with the space at Cardiff CIA, couldn’t fit anything into the Wolverhampton Civic. Put Monitor world in the store room stage left, steve mixed through the open door of Cambridge Corn Exchange. Luckily didn’t let anything roll of the rake at Blackpool Opera House, really couldn’t fit anything into Bradford St Georges Hall so much so we put monitor world in the back stage corridor, it would have been the truck but we didn’t have long enough RF cables. Met the guys pre-rigging the subsequently canceled Elton John show at the Nottingham Metro Arena. After by far the best audience so far at Liverpool Echo it’s good to be up on stage at a safe distance from all those women here at Glasgow Clyde. The audiences have been so great today we are working out a second encore!
This really is a great entertaining show, roll on the second tour, Japan anybody?
Posted in Audio, Nolan Sisters Tour | 2 Comments »
October 25th, 2009
How does The Nolans Sisters “In the Mood Again” UK Tour works?
This system is based on the system we use on Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds, only here we only have 24 tracks of playback instead of 48 and it’s triggered by the MD rather than myself, and here’s how it all works. The Nolans it is 18 individual pieces comprising of three medleys and two unaccompanied numbers. So this all needed to be triggered auto stop CD player I hear you say but that doesn’t work if you need it to be multi track and output time code for video, lights and sound.
So it had to be a multi track playback system, now I am a big ProTools fan but that’s a lot of expensive hardware to be touring round the country that your not even approaching it’s full potential add to that the need for a backup. This would also have been a bit of hard work as the sessions we’re all created in Logic. So it didn’t need to be anything more than a hard disk multi track, however it would need to have means of getting the audio on from logic digitally and then play it out over analogue so it could go through the A/B switcher then split world. There are not that many around that are proven so it was either the Fostex 2424lv same as what was used on The War of The Worlds or the Mackie SDR 24/96 we went with the Mackie’s as that what was on the shelf at Autograph and from an operation point of view they are much of a much ness.
With the audio play back hardware taken care of next was how was this all going to work, I wanted to give the MD a go button as it puts the control in their hands and I did not want to be tied to the controls of the playback as i would mean I was unable to go and deal with a fault mid show. So being a theatre lad at heart I turned to G-Type to deal with the stopping and locating through out the show.
When I got the Logic sessions their start time was all at 01:00:00.00 and all was routed out of the stereo left and right. The first task was to move the numbers out in time, so the first number ‘Holding out for a Hero’ starts at 01:00:00.00 this being a medley of four songs the second number ‘Pull My Self Together starts at 01:20:00.00, and the next at 01:30:00.00 this gave plenty of space between the songs and kept maths simple for creating the cue list later. Before I laid back the songs to the Mackie I stripped time code to track 24, an old school practice I know but by having the time code as a continuous audio track. Doing it this way rather than using the time code output from the machine just makes duplicating it to the backup and connecting it into the switch simpler. I laid back the tracks from Logic with both systems locked to together and Logic chasing the Mackie.
With all the audio transferred the next step was to create the cue list in G-Type, using it to send out a MMC (Midi Machine Control) Locate, to locate the Mackie to the start of the song, inserted inline with the MIDI into the Mackie are two Midi Solutions Footswitch Controllers one one configured to send out MMC Go and the other MMC Stop, it’s in to these that the MD GO and Stop Button connects to. The MTC (Midi Time Code) from the Mackies is then fed back into G-Type so the next Locate cue is triggered just after the song finishes. And there by the magic of theatre MD conducts the band and starts the songs and if necessary can stop them. The SMPTE time code from track 24 goes through a distribution amp before being sent off to the necessary locations.
All this is packaged well in a floating 22U case so from a daily touring point of view it is very quick and easy to set up and up, literally front and back off power in signal out off to catering. And now, about half way thought the tour has been rock solid.
Tags: Autograph Sound Recording., G-Type, Midi, Midi TIme Code, Nolan Sisters UK Tout
Posted in Audio, Nolan Sisters Tour | 4 Comments »
October 14th, 2009
So it’s day two here in Manchester Apollo and it’s DVD shoot day there are we’ve moved the Front of house position to the back of the stalls, there are four cameras now out there two either side of the front of the Stalls and one on a track in front of the stage, two on either side of the stage and a flown one off the screen truss. The record truck has put two Studer here at my end of spit world and they are taking a passive spilt of everything plus some effects returns from Simon front of house and a few audience mic’s. As they DVD is due to be released in about 15 days there is very little time to do much work in Post so we’re not getting involved with us clocking to them or them taking my show timecode as there is just not the time for it.
This has meant our three truck and three busses tour has grown today with the addition of a video truck, a audio truck, truck full of cable, though it’s empty at the moment! And another catering uint to feed them all.
This afternoon we are doing the show just for camera so there is an invited audience out there of about 200. So go on pre order the DVD now it’s out mid November.
Posted in Audio, Nolan Sisters Tour | 1 Comment »
October 12th, 2009
Two gigs down and what a storm. The show is going down really well. Though what could be a bit devastating is there is a hint of a bug going round all the back line is loaded and the sound truck should be best part done now. So I’m off to wash my hands and eat my sandwich. Oh and I can pick up the wi-fi from the production tour bus!
Posted in Audio, Nolan Sisters Tour | 8 Comments »
October 11th, 2009
So it’s all loaded in, it’s a good fit which was to be expected Electrics and Rigging tipped in at 8 we we’re a bit slow to get at the We didn’t start tipping the Backline and monitors until gone midday, we should start at 11. But it’s all in and and I’ve done the necessary edits and have cloned it across to the 2nd drive. it took just a little too long we we’re about 5 minutes late starting sound check but we’re up and running now just rehearsing the boy does nothing.
Posted in Audio, Nolan Sisters Tour | No Comments »
October 10th, 2009
Starting the final rehearsal not in a full state of reediness is less than ideal but with the with my A playback machine still with 20% to copy of the edits I made during lunch I didn’t want to hold the Final Dress as there was also an invited audience. There were no changes to the top of the show so the B Stack would be good. True to my maths the copy finished half way through the first medley, so disk out re-boot and ready for the second number. And by the time the third number arrived both the A and B machines up and running with the correct session. Things like this are great to keep you on your toes, but it also proves all the kit behaves as intended.
So backline and monitors are loaded. The with audience performance went well it was the first time we had run the support Jakie and Shane Jr into the show at pace. There are two track edits to do tomorrow which is a bit disappointing but to be honest not surprising. This show is going to be really good the girls have got the costume changes pretty well nailed and the dancers are top. Steve, Tim and my self did find ourselves jigging away towards then end. All the Keyboards and Playback kit packed down well as planned getting it all on the truck is a bit of a game of tetris as ever, oh the joys of backline. So left to go on our truck was the steel deck and set pieces and I’m best off out of that. So I’ve got my bunk front top left, don’t think I’ve done a top bunk before, I have got windows which while is exciting now I think might not be in the long run, though it’s not like it is light really early now is it.
Posted in Audio, Nolan Sisters Tour | 1 Comment »
