Tony Blanc and Bill Chrysler Get It Up In Record Time for Christina Aguilera.
OK, I admit it. I wanted to talk with the Christina Aguilera tour guys because she totally blew me away with her performances on the last two Grammy telecasts. Her duet with Herbie Hancock last year and the tribute to James Brown with “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” proved that the budding diva has not only pipes, but taste and chops to match.
Someone in her organization also knows wazzup in the real world, and there was none of that kind of thing at this show. She played to her fan base and, while it wasn’t my thang, I was very much in the minority. Her sound guys — Tony Blanc, at FOH since 2003, and Bill Chrysler, manning Monitor World for seven years now — understand the deal as well. While they take a lot of pride in their work, they both understand that this tour is all about the show. Their daily challenge is to make things sound great on a tour where audio is far from the primary consideration. My guess is that it falls somewhere in the pecking order after hair and makeup.
Tony, you have been with her four years and, Bill, you for seven. Four years with anybody these days is a long time.
Bill Chrysler: Yeah, but at her age especially, that’s a huge portion of her life!
I had Showco send me out a gear list before I came out here, and I gotta tell you, the first thing that struck me was Prism. This is the first arena show I’ve been to in Vegas that did not carry a line array. So what’s the thinking?
Tony Blanc: This is a Showco/Clair tour. That opens us to the option of having a Prism system. We are independents. We do move around, but a lot of audio choices are made by the accountants, the management and what works for the project in question. Today we got our points at 3 o’clock in the afternoon for a 5 p.m. soundcheck.
At what time?
Blanc: You heard right, at three p.m. I saw that when we first started putting this tour together, there was a time factor and a very critical one. We’re running two sound points a side. We’ve got cable bridges — we use the side lighting trusses as cable bridges — so there’s only actually four sound points. If we had the 12 needed for the I-4, we wouldn’t be doing this interview.
Now, is that typical to have that little setup time?
Blanc: Last two shows out of six, it’s been that tight. It’s down to the load-in, it’s down to the riggers, but there’s always worst-case scenario, and you’ve got to look at it as that being the guideline. With an I-4 system, you can’t run that late in the day. You have to have the points by noon. I don’t really have the time to walk the zones, don’t really have the time to leave my mix. Once this thing is up and going, we hit sound check and go straight into the show. We had half an hour today to be show ready. There’s a time factor you have to bear in mind on these very big tours. We’ve got 18 trucks out here of gear, and it’s a very tight day.
I still believe in the church-organ philosophy of the way the Prism is put together, the way it covers a room, and I’m comfortable standing at my mix, knowing it’s going to sound the same in 90% of the venue. I don’t have a great fear factor, whereas certain other systems, you can walk across the whole face of it, and it changes in 10 feet.
I think when you’re looking at audio systems, the Prism is one of four systems designed with some thought, others being the Clair Brothers I-4, JBL VerTec and V-DOSC.
So, talk to me about monitors a little bit. All PMs? All wedges?
Chrysler: This is the first tour that she has gone completely PMs. At the end of last tour, she was using one ear for a little bit. She really wants to use that technology, and she thinks she sings more on pitch with a PM system. For the first tour, we never used ears, only conventional wedges, and it was great. I don’t think she ever asked for anything ever.
Really?
Chrysler: Yeah. And really, she doesn’t. I know what she wants, and I can dial it up for her, but at the beginning of the second tour, it started out on wedges, and then she wanted to use the new technology, but she didn’t like it with both ears. So we got along with one, and it worked pretty good. Of course, it’s a different mix when you’re only using one ear. You’re putting in a voice and some reverb and a piano, maybe something pitch, something to time to, a little kick, snare, hat. And then, when we went to Europe, out of the clear blue, she just said, “I want to use both ears.” And we’re prepared for it, so she gave me half an hour. I dialed up a whole complete mix for ears, and we’ve never gone back. So now I have 16 wedges on the stage. The downstage two, the center two wedges on one mix, and then seven on the left and seven on the right are all one mix. I have 14 wedges on one mix. And then I have side fills, stereo side fills and the music director/keyboard player has one wedge. Everybody on the band has PMs; everybody has a studio mix…
What are all those wedges for then?
Chrysler: To keep the dancers feeling good, you know? There’s a lot of dancers out there, and Christina loves to feel the stage. She loves to feel it. And she does a lot of dancing, and she’s completely lost her earpack a couple of times. With her wardrobe changes, she gets unplugged pretty regularly.
What do you do then?
Chrysler: She just pulls out the PMs. I’ve talked to all of the dancers about “here’s how you plug it in.” Every once in a while, I’ll see her backing up to someone with her hand, you know, “plug this in.” But she’s adapted really, really well. In fact, a little bit too well. We haven’t been out that long, you know, a few months, and she is dependent on the PM now, and I could control her mic technique very easy with the wedges. If she started to get real comfortable and started to back off the mic, I would just turn down her wedges. She goes further away from the mic than pretty much anybody I’ve seen. A foot and a half is not unusual. I mean, she’s way out there.
Speaking of vocal mics, I was almost sure that I saw her using the Shure KSM-9 on a couple of TV shows, and I didn’t see that on the list.
Chrysler: Yeah, we did that on a couple of TV shows, but we’re finding a problem with it in a loud environment.
Just too wide?
Blanc: Yeah. I used in on Alicia Keys, and she sucked right up to it, and it was one of the best vocal sounds I’ve heard. I had a great time with it. When we came on here, we were supposed to use the KSM, but the minute we got up onstage, the volume, I couldn’t get anything out at the house. I mean nothing.
So what is she actually using?
Blanc: A Shure 87-C capsule on the new UHF-R transmitters. I’d love her on a SM58, but she wanted something smaller.
With all of those wedges up there, is there an issue with wash off of the stage when you’re mixing front of house?
Chrysler: We’ve been told by management that sound can take a priority here, so we’ve lowered the side fills, and they’re pretty close, so we don’t turn ‘em up real loud. Her voice is not real loud in the wedges or the side fills because she’s got plenty of it in her PMs. It’s more a musical thing for the dancers and all of that. I mean, there’s definitely some in there, but it’s not real loud. Now, if she takes an earpiece out, that’s different. Then it gets loud onstage. But we try and keep it reasonable, and Tony and I work together real well.
Blanc: — And with the 21 people onstage
Chrysler: That breaks down to 12 musicians, she is the 13th, so there’s actually 13 people up there that are part of the music, plus the eight dancers.
So what’s the coolest thing about this gig?
Blanc: Bill.
Chrysler: Stuart Bennett. [Blanc took over for Bennett three years ago. — ed.]
Blanc: No, we have a great bunch of people out here. A lot of us have been here since I’ve been around, so… The band, the dancers, the core backline crew and us have all been here a long time. However, all of our touring and management staff have changed. Everybody’s really nice. When you do these diva shows, it’s about the show. It’s not about audio. It’s not about one thing. It’s about the show, and I like the fact that we’re not sitting here going, “What? It isn’t all about audio!?!”
So what’s the biggest challenge of the gig?
Blanc: Separating 80 inputs. We’ve got a Pro Tools system running that has elements in it with loops, or sound effects, same as if you’re making a hip-hop record. There’s stuff going on also being played by the band that want to be better than the machine, or they’re doubling a part or playing something different, so sometimes you’ve got it layering up three or four layers deep. Other times, it’s one layer deep, so to make that consistent flow of sound or make the thing sound big all the time is the challenge.
