LONDON — The 20-show Take That Circus tour was among the biggest the U.K. and Ireland had ever seen, with over a million people attending. Capital Sound was the soundco, with technical director Ian Colville designing the system with FOH engineer Gary Bradshaw and system technician Al Woods using a combination of DiGiCo, XTA and Martin Audio gear. “No one wanted to tempt fate by saying it while the tour was in progress, but everything worked perfectly,” said Colville. “Al and Gary set exceptionally high standards and, as far as I know, they didn’t get a single sound complaint. It was fantastic.”
“My primary role at Capital is to work with system techs and engineers and make sure they get exactly what they want — and that it works,” Colville added. “The basic sound system wasn’t that different from the band’s last stadium tour. It comprises four large hangs of PA on the stage and up to a maximum of four delay towers deployed on the stadium pitches, which is a fairly standard size package for this type of tour.”
Three DiGiCo D5s were used, one for Bradshaw at FOH, one for Steve Lutley at the monitor position and then a further D5 for support band monitors. “The show started with the boys out on the B stage,” Colville noted. “Steve felt too cut off 50 meters away in his bunker so he decided to remotely control his D5 from the FOH mix tower for that section of the show.”
Woods, meanwhile, observed that “an RC unit was networked to Steve’s D5 and everything was mirrored.” There were 56 separate inputs and a mini rack for each console, split passively. Bradshaw used most of the internal effects on the console and kept things simple, which is his trademark.
“Once again, DiGiCo were fantastic to deal with,” said Martin Connolly, project manager for Capital Sound.. “The support we received was second to none.”
Colville added, “we always use XTA for processing on this system. We tried the 4 Series for this tour and used them exclusively as crossovers for the delay towers and they worked exceptionally well, performing faultlessly.”
The PA included main hangs of Martin Audio Longbow — 56 in total, with 56 W8LC as delays.
“We decided to use a 12 cell horizontal sub bass array each side of the stage and electronically ‘bend’ it to produce the required dispersion,” said Colville. “This is something we haven’t done on this scale before and it worked very well. We used XTA DP226s to progressively delay the feed to the subs from the centre to the outside of the arrays. Considering we only had 24 subs on the stage, they produced tight, even coverage. Gary and Al were both very happy with the design, and for me, that’s good enough.”
A total of 16 XTA units were used — four DP448s and 12 DP226s — all networked via XTA’s AudioCore software.
“Using the Martin rig, with the versatility of the way Martin drives its system, you have a lot of control over zoning, and it worked well,” said Woods. “We didn’t have production rehearsals and, although the system was all prepped beautifully, it came together in dribs and drabs and it was only in Sunderland,” the first date of the tour, “that we married everything up for the first time. That can bring to light connectivity problems. Any data runs over long cables can be susceptible to interference. However, it proved not to be a problem.
“It was very challenging dealing with the amount of audience noise and reflections in the venues, but it all worked well and the feedback we got, including from the people running the venues, was very positive. In fact, during the four nights there, and with feedback from the customers, Wembley Stadium had no official audio complaints — the first time in its history,” Woods added.
For more information, please visit www.digico.org , www.xta.co.uk and www.martin-audio.com.
