I met with Joe O'Herlihy, U2's audio director and FOH mixer, in the Nevada desert just outside of Las Vegas. U2 was playing in Sam Boyd Stadium on Oct 23. This was one of the many stops on the bands' very ambitious 360º tour. Ambitious not for the amount of dates played, but because of the size, scope and magnitude of the 360º project.
Originally I had planned to do a nice simple interview and call it a day. That idea was simply not a possibility. Joe is so interconnected with U2 (more than 31 years at the mixing console) and the development of the 360º tour, not to mention more than 25 years with Clair Brothers Audio, it just made more sense to write about Joe and the tour as one.
As I drove towards the stadium, I could see the enormous claw (or "space station," as Bono prefers to call it) from miles away. This structure supports the Clair sound system, lights, a 60-ton video screen and a disco ball (of course). It weighs in at a hefty 140 tons itself and rises nearly 175 feet from the stadium floor.
As I walked into the arena, Jo Ravitch, Clair's crew chief, was busy checking and tuning the sound system. I mentioned Jo Ravitch because he has had a relationship with the band spanning more than 25 years, and goes back with Joe O'Herlihy longer than that. Anyway, Dave Coyle (Clair system engineer 2) gave me the tour of the entire rig. He started by explaining that the sound system is a "joint effort between Joe O'Herlihy and Clair Brothers. Joe O's idea and the R&D boys and several other people at Clair Brothers came up with the concept of a dual line array system.
"What you have are two sets of Clair I-5 and I-5B boxes per side (Front of House) and single sets of I-5s and I-5Bs on the sides, then a copy of the front I-5 and I-5Bs at the back," Coyle said. The inside column of boxes are carrying the vocals and guitars and the outside columns carry the bass, drums, keys and whatever else. So, there are two separate left and right signals up front and in the rear and left and right signals on either side.
Shane Swisher, who handles media relations for Clair, supplied me with some speaker specs. FOH has L/R hangs of 36 Clair I-5 and I-5B on each side and rear L/R hangs of 24 Clair I-5 and I-5B. At house left, there are L/R hangs of 16 Clair I-5 and I-5B, and at house right, L/R hangs of 16 Clair I-5 and I-B. There are also 72 Clair S4 subs and 24 Clair BT218 subs along with 24 Clair FF2 front fills. The gear list also includes 32 Clair IDL delay cabinets (they were not used at this stadium) and 12 Clair 12AMII monitor wedges. Even so, the band relies mainly on PMs – I saw only two of these monitors on stage in front of Bono's position. The sound is driven by 152 Lab.gruppen PLM 10000Q and PLM 14000 amplifiers for the arrays, Powersoft K10 amps for the subs, Lab.gruppen amps for the monitors and Crown amplifiers for the front fills.
I liked the fact that the amps are grouped at the base of each leg. It makes for shorter cable runs to the arrays and looks very neat and stealthy. For that matter, the stage is very clean looking. There are also light operators in the legs of the Claw. This makes them invisible to the audience. It's all part of the design and look of the production.
Okay, back to the gear. The microphones are pretty regular. A lot of 57s and 58 miking the guitar amps and drums. A couple of AKG 414s and 451EBs, Sennheiser MKH-416 and MD-421 and a Beyer M88. Bono sings through a Shure wireless with a Beta58 or regular 58 cartridge, depending on his mood. There are also Sennheiser radios, Shure headsets and Countryman DI boxes. Sounds like a regular club band, doesn't it?
Dave Coyle also gave me a tour of the "underworld" (monitor world under the stage). It looked like the mission control room at NASA. Very clean and functional. The area sported two DiGiCo SD7 boards (one for Bono and one for The Edge), plus a Digidesign D-Show Pro for Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. and the offstage keyboards. There was yet another Digidesign D-Show Pro as a backup. Niall Slevin, Dave Skaff and Alastair McMillan mix monitors.
At about 4 p.m., Joe O and the band arrived for sound check. The sound check only took about 30 minutes. I think that the prep work that Jo Ravitch had done made it easy for Joe O and the band. Just good teamwork. After the sound check, I had some time with Joe O'Herlihy. He is a really pleasant and unassuming individual. I asked some questions, but basically let him talk about the band, the tour and his interest.
FOH: I know you have been with the band for more than 30 years, but how did you meet them?
Joe O'Herlihy: 31 years September 25th just gone. I had started a sound company in Cork (Ireland), where I come from, after being on the road with Rory Gallagher (also from Cork) for five years. We supplied a P.A. for a show on the 5th of September at the Arcadia ballroom at the UCC [University College Cork] downtown campus, and these guys were the fifth band on a typical college gig. We treated them pretty well, as we do, and after that, Paul McGuinness (U2's manager) liked what he heard and was happy with the service we provided, and the phone kept ringing. So we started doing a lot of little gigs around the place. I was building my business, but having spent five years touring the world, I could give the guys a lot of advice at a very early stage. We just hit it off and I have pretty much been there ever since. There are only a handful of gigs I haven't done.
If it's not you mixing, they're not doing it.
That's a nice thought, but there you go.
Who's' idea was this 360º tour?
The band has always liked the intimacy of having the audience all around them. They decided that one day they would do this in a stadium setting. That frame of mind first started back in The Joshua Tree tour. By the end of the Vertigo tour in 2006 at Aloha stadium in Honolulu, walking around that stadium the decision and the incentive for Bono was that "we have to do this 360º thing now!" We have been talking about it long enough. And that was the brief to Willy Williams, the stage designer. My brief was, ‘Well, this is what we are going to do.' So I began my basic system design and investigation then. That was two years before the tour. We worked on it with Clair. You know we have been with them for the best part of 30 years. [But] with the 360º tour we had to start from scratch. It just hadn't been done before.
And with Jo Ravitch?
With Jo Ravitch, 25 years. I first met Jo in 1976. He was with Hall & Oates, and I was working with Rory. It was Hall and Oates, Rory Gallagher and Ted Nugent and we did a tour around the Midwest. So, Jo and I go back that far. But he has been my systems guy for 25 years. He knows systems inside and out. I completely respect and trust the man.
Do you work with the band in the studio?
I have done up until Achtung Baby, and after that, I come in, but don't stay all the time. Simply because two different disciplines have developed in the context of what we do. Working in the studio is 48 hours a day, eight days a week for the engineer, the producer, for everybody involved. The band comes and goes as they please. When you're in the studio all the time, then you go out on tour, you've got nothing left in the engine. I stepped back from the studio because the responsibility of putting the shows together became such a task.
When you are not on the road, do you socialize with the band?
We socialize. We all live in Dublin, it's very much a family-orientated type of thing. We go to births, communions, weddings, funerals. We all get together a couple of times a year and have a good night out, a dinner thing. There is a lot more to it than this [the road]. You could get completely waylaid with all of this.
What do you do outside of U2?
The band took a two-year sabbatical after the Zoo TV tour. I went off and was the audio design consultant for Woodstock 94 and was up there for about four or five months. Sixty-eight bands, three stages, a turntable [stage]. I put the audio footprint together and did the sound system for each of the stages. I loved all of that, did all of that. Then I went out for a year and a half with REM. I came back and did the Popmart tour with the guys, then another REM tour.
I've always been interested in acoustic design. I now have a company in the U.K. called Vangardia Consulting. We did the acoustic design and treatment for the new Wembley Stadium, 92,000 seats. I have done quite a few stadiums and arenas around Europe.
Now, with the 360º sound system it has been a complete and utter integrated design. With U2, the sonic value is always a very substantial priority. The system you see up there is my sound design, but the development of that is done through Clair's design team. You see, up there we have two separate line arrays side by side and normally that is a no-can-do. My idea is you can actually do that when you put different information into the different lines. The intelligibility and the SPL are quite spectacular. When you fly a system that high you have the airspace as well, and, as you know, a sound system needs air to breath. But I will let you be the ear and decision-maker as to whether it works or not.
I saw an interesting sub setup around the main stage.
Yes, we have 72 S4 subs. There are 36 in the front line and 36 directly behind them in the back line. We have configured them in a cardioid movement. We set the back line 54 inches behind the front line. The front line fires forward and the backline fires into the back of the front line. There is a phase cancellation which allows us to direct the bass. This is called low end steering. We are steering the bass into the stadium.
So there is no low-end rumble on the deck?
There is no bass transmission going backward. We also have front fills, FF2s, on the top of the front line subs. What they do is pull the sound down from the arrays overhead. Sort of an acoustic phenomenon that draws you to the tiny front fill speakers but still gives you the big sound of the system. This is the kind of detail we went through designing this system.
Why the DiGiCo SD7 mixing console?
We are sending audio to 16 different destinations from the console. The DiGiCo has made that possible. It has an incredible matrix component that makes this all possible without any other gear. We also have complete redundancy. There are two boards, two of everything.
A Note of Thanks
That was about the extent of my talk with Joe O'Herlihy. Of course, I stayed for the show and the sound was quite impressive, especially in the inner ring in front of the stage. I stood directly in front of the subs with the front fills on them. I was not overwhelmed by bass but experienced a very clean, defined mix.
Before I leave you, I have to mention something else about the man, Joe O'Herlihy. I did not receive a meal ticket when I entered the stadium. After my interview I mentioned this to Joe O and assumed he would direct me to the appropriate location to retrieve a ticket. However, he took off on foot and returned 20 minutes later with my ticket. I have spent a lot of time with people in this business but I have never met someone so accommodating. Thanks, Joe.
