Rob Zombie takes no prisoners. His live show is a full-on assault every second he and his dynamite band — guitarist John 5, drummer Ginger Fish and bassist Piggy-D — are onstage. The group’s blazing metal/hard rock sound pummels the audience, but it’s the multimedia spectacle accompanying Zombie’s dark, tongue-in-cheek songs that really whips them into submission: Thousands of bizarre images flash on screens behind the stage — everything from hypnotic op-art visuals (on “Living Dead Girl”), to flowing blood (on “Dragula”), to eerie old black & white footage from a 1930s Frankenstein film (for “Jesus Frankenstein”), to flashing patterns, flaming pentagrams, pyrotechnics and the occasional lyric prompt for the crowd to shout out with the charismatic Mr. Zombie. Real flames burst up from behind the band, skeletons adorn the sides of the stage, and other strange characters appear for a few moments, then vanish in this macabre rock nightmare.
Sensory Overload
Comments front-of-house mixer Joel Lonky with a little laugh, “The whole point of our show — and this is Rob’s vision — is he wants it to be a complete sensory overload, and I think he’s achieving that.”
Indeed. And the crowds love it. Rob Zombie has built a thoroughly devoted following since breaking in as the lead singer and songwriter of White Zombie in 1985, then branching off as a solo act a few years later. Since the late 1980s, he’s led a succession of aggressive metal bands under his name, written scads of twisted songs filled with blood, satanic imagery and other dark fantasies, and also supervised his increasingly theatrical performances. On the side he has become a renowned director of gory horror films (such House of 1000 Corpses, a remake of Halloween and the forthcoming The Lords of Salem) and has managed to integrate clips of his films into his rock show.
When we caught up with Lonky, who has worked with Zombie for seven years, and whose extensive credit list also includes tours with Rage Against the Machine, Maroon 5, Cypress Hill and the Goo Goo Dolls (for whom he still works as a tour and production manager), Zombie was just finishing up a co-headlining tour with Megadeth that had taken them to a number of East Coast and Heartland arenas, as well as to the Rock the Range and Rocklahoma festivals. The afternoon we spoke, Lonky had just finished the sound check at the Hartman Arena in Wichita, Kansas.
Sonic Purity
For the past few years, Zombie’s tours have been equipped by Sound Image (Escondido, CA), but the 2012 tour is the first to feature Adamson’s new and highly touted Energia E15 enclosure from Adamson “It’s just been a dream, and it’s still in beta testing,” Lonky says of the Adamson E15 rig. “It’s by far the most sonically pure, musical and powerful PA I’ve mixed on, bar none. It’s amazing; I love this thing! I don’t want to go anywhere without it.”
“Our system features two arrays of the speakers, 15 deep, 30 boxes total,” Lonky adds. “It curves, and it’s completely adjustable. Once you shoot the room with the laser and simulate the desired angles with the new Adamson Blueprint AV software, you can preset on the ground in stacks of up to five. Another really cool feature is, they automatically latch together once you land them on each other — when the pins touch, they lock into place, and then you lift it. It’s that easy. It’s one of the easiest-rigging PAs I’ve ever used.” The E15s were complemented by Adamson’s T-21 subs with their impressive dual 21-inch neodymium Kevlar drivers in end-fire configuration. “We did not have to worry about the low end,” Lonky notes.
At FOH
Also new for Lonky on this year’s Rob Zombie show is the 80-channel Midas PRO9 FOH desk; last year he used a PRO6. “It’s basically the same surface and all the same processing as the 6, but it’s great having the extra channels,” he says. “One of the things that allows me to do is, instead of the effects returning through the effects return, I’m actually returning them to channels, which gives me a little more ability to tailor the sound of the effects. I think I’m running something like 63 inputs at this point. I’ve been a Midas guy pretty much exclusively since the mid-1990s,” he continues, except for a couple of years when he went with a different digital board. “But when the Pro Series came out, I jumped right back into Midas.”
As for outboard gear, Lonky says among his most important pieces are “two Eventide H3000 DSEs for Rob’s vocals, wired in parallel so they’re always running, so if one goes down, I have a seamless transition and no one knows it went down. His vocal is all wet — there’s no dry vocal. I’ve been using Eventide since I was doing Rage in the early 1990s. I also have the TC 2290 [Dynamic Digital Delay], which is tied to the Midas via MIDI, because I have over 40 scenes in the Midas and the delay times are changing for each song, along with the BPMs.
“I have a Waves hardware MaxxBCL unit inserted on left and right, and that’s amazing; it’s one of my new favorite tools. It’s basically a bottom-end compressor — bottom end harmonic boost — but it does it in a way that it doesn’t overtax the PA. It creates the harmonics that you would normally have in a mastering unit. In fact, a lot of people use it as mastering unit. It’s basically three Waves plug-ins in a standalone hardware device.” Lonky adds, “I’m going to try to implement Waves racks into the Midas system via AES 50 to MADI. That’s in the works right now. I’ve been working with Scott Peterson at Waves and Jay Easley at Midas on that.”
The Onstage Sound
Lonky’s current mic-of-choice for Zombie is a Shure B58 capsule, “but we vary it, we’ve used Sennheisers, E-Vs, Shures. The way I set his vocal, it doesn’t really matter what capsule it is, because it’s so processed. I run [the mic signal] into a channel and I compress it with the Midas onboard ‘vintage’ compressor, and I EQ it there. I send it pre-fade to the H3000 and then the actual channel I mix is the H3000 return line, which has its own EQ and compressor. It’s a very controlled vocal line.”
Drummer Ginger Fish (formerly with Marilyn Manson’s band) uses two kick drums, for which Lonky employs a Shure 91 and a Beyer M88. The upper snare is a Shure Beta 56, the lower a Neumann KM184. A second snare gets an Audio-Technica AE3000. Cymbals and overheads are KM184s. There is also an Akai MPC and an Octapad that are run through Radial J48 DIs.
For guitarist John 5 (another Manson band alumnus; he’s also played with everyone from Judas Priest to Alice Cooper to k.d. lang), “I’ve gone to an iso cabinet with a single-12 Celestion that matches what John has in his [Marshall] cabinet. In that iso box, there’s a Heil PR 31BW and a Shure KSM 44 mic — that’s my left and right. Then, for my center channel, I use the Radial JDX that’s in line with the powered speaker line. I use a little time delay on some of them to create an even deeper sound field for more depth. He plays [mostly Telecasters] through Marshalls — a lot of overdrive and a couple of pedals here and there, but that’s it.
“For [bassist] Piggy D, I have a pre-DI that gets his clean bass, and then I use a Radial JDX in line with the speaker — that’s his amplified effected sound. It’s all very clean. I don’t get any stage noise per se from the backline. He has differently tuned basses which are different outputs, so in each scene, I tailor his EQ to whatever note bass he’s playing, whether its C-sharp or whatever, and, depending on whether it’s his fingers or his pick. So each scene has a different EQ for his bass and different head amp settings and compressor settings to match what he’s doing.”
For monitors are 10 Sound Image MA212s for Zombie, Piggy and John 5, while Fish wears Shure hard-wired in-ears. For sidefills are three L-Acoustics V-DOSC sitting on one SB28 sub per side. The monitor console — shared by Green Day veteran Beau Alexander (for Zombie) and Scott Boculac (for Megadeth) is a Yamaha PM5D. Other key Zombie audio team members include system engineer Andrew Dowling and monitor tech Tarik Khan, both from Sound Image.
“I’ve tried to keep the audio team intact, because everyone works so great together,” Lonky says. “I’m going to try to do it in the fall, too, which should be a revamped show. It’s hard work, but it’s also a lot of fun. It’s been awesome.”
Adamson Project Energia: Evolution of a System
Less than a year ago, Adamson rolled out the first phase of Energia, its new flagship loudspeaker system. Since then, a handful of partnering soundcos have deployed hundreds of beta cabinets, including Sound Image, which took a full Energia rig this January.
At the heart of the E15 array is the E-Capsule (pictured above) housing the mid/high components: two 7-inch Kevlar cone mid drivers and two 4-inch diaphragm/1.5-inch exit compression drivers mounted on a Co-Linear Drive Module providing tight, controlled 90°-by-6° dispersion. Flanking the capsule are two Neodymium Kevlar-cone 15-inch woofers, each in separate 11-ply birch ply enclosures. The compact array is 15.4 by 51.4 by 21.1 inches (HxWxD) and weighs 176 pounds. The design suite of Blueprint AV software was also launched with Beta I testers.
A key part of Energia is Adamson’s AutoLock® rigging system, featuring color-coded annular positioning that automatically locks each 4-cabinet stack into a single array. Designed to be fast and simple to use, Autolock rigging mounts directly to the steel/aluminum E-Capsule, promising greater accuracy and longevity in harsh weather conditions than rigging systems mounted directly to wooden cabinets.
At ProLight+Sound 2012, Adamson unveiled Beta II, which adds two proprietary Class-D amp modules flanking the E-Capsule, using its entire metal frame as a heat sink. Also part of this is a master Ground Control unit with advanced diagnostics and control including energy metering and angular data of each enclosure and access to individual bands in each E15 array. Four E15s connect via a single cable supplying power, audio and network signals to the Ground Control unit, offering multiple redundancy options.
Project Energia is designed to give solutions to common problems and streamline concert loudspeaker system implementation. Yet to come is Beta III, which adds network management and AVB interfacing via the complete version of Blueprint AV software suite, bringing simulation, adaptation and diagnostics into a comprehensive single GUI.
—George Petersen
