The holiday season has enough stresses on its own without adding a two-week, 12-show tour with longtime music superstars Vince Gill and Amy Grant. But Hugh Johnson, 21-year FOH engineer and production manager for Gill, takes it in stride, delivering excellence through consistency with a dedicated production team giving their best each day.
Catching up with Johnson at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, I got a glimpse into the Twelve Days of Christmas production and some of the gear and techniques the crew uses to ensure that the theater-sized shows gave audiences the powerful sound yet intimate feel that Gill and Grant wanted to share during the holidays. Ranging in size from the 2,300 seat Ryman up to the 4,600 seat Fox Theater in Atlanta, the tour showcased the talent of not only the headliners but also Gill's top-notch band, including a four-piece horn section added for the holiday shows.
Sound Image provided all FOH and monitor audio support for the tour, although at five venues including the Ryman the installed house PA was used. The Ryman system is comprised of JBL VerTec line arrays at left and right with subs in a center cluster that provide coverage in the balcony and deck-stacked VerTec speakers and subs for the floor seating. Front fills include JBL and Sound Image speakers and a delay ring of JBL 4212 speakers provide under-balcony coverage. Crown amps drive all speakers, and Ryman house audio engineer Les Banks manages the system through a Lake Contour wireless speaker controller, which is a key tool for visiting audio engineers to tune the room.
Acoustic Challenges
Johnson has mixed many shows at the Ryman, and is well-accustomed to the acoustic challenges that the room presents. The all-wood design (the building was originally designed as a church and the audience sits in wood pews throughout the venue) creates a stark contrast between sound check and performance due to the change in high/mid frequency response when the room fills with people.
Tuning each room for Vince Gill's shows is of paramount importance to Johnson, who depends on his ears and his trustworthy Klark Teknik DN6000 RTA (paired with its original room mic) to adjust the system. Starting with Banks' house preset, Johnson walks the upper and lower zones of the room with the Lake Contour to fine-tune during sound check, knowing that some adjustments will need to be made in real-time during the opening songs to compensate for the audience. Andrew Dowling and Todd Wines, assisting in tech duties from Sound Image, also use a SMAART analyzer to double check the room response throughout the show.
Besides the atypical acoustics, touring groups at the Ryman also mix from a unique position: at the top of the balcony against the back wall aisle, which remains open for audience access throughout the show. The house console sits at center, but many tours including Gill's bring in their own FOH gear which is set up in an area to the left of center, somewhat midway between the left side array and center subs. The tight fit is a cinch for Johnson, who pilots an Avid Venue Profile console and single outboard rack at FOH. Although the mix position is off-axis from any sweet spot, Johnson knows the sound differences between his position and the balcony seats below, and assembles a full mix through some magical reference offset in his mind.
The Processing Chain
To get the consistent, smooth vocal that Gill's fans expect, Johnson utilizes his outboard processing rack, routing the analog signal direct from the Shure KSM 9 mic into a vintage Summit MPC-100A compressor for warmth, followed by a BSS 901 multi-band compressor. Back at the console, the vocals get final processing with a Waves C4 plug-in at the console. Vince's vocal turns out to be the only analog signal (for the band) that gets snaked to FOH; all other vocals and instruments use the Avid stage rack and digital snake (the show takes about 60 inputs from stage to console, about a dozen more than the usual Gill tour).
This routing may seem counterintuitive at first, since the Profile is capable of duplicating the front-end compression using plug-ins, but Johnson explains that it is far more convenient to reach over and adjust a BSS setting on Gill's vocal during song changes rather than juggling control screens to access a virtual knob and potentially missing a cue for another event on the control surface. The proof was obvious during the show, when Gill would sing with different vocal stylizations or talk to the audience, and Johnson was easily able to make fine adjustments while advancing his show snapshot or adjusting another element of the mix.
The same logic holds for effects, specifically reverbs on vocals and drums. Since each song requires some manipulation of certain parameters, Johnson prefers using a TC Electronics M5000 inserted in the Profile channel signal path via AES. This gives him instant access to the knobs without changing his main screen view.
For this show, Johnson uses a similar processing chain using onboard plug-ins for Amy Grant and all other vocalists. (A wide variety of plug-ins is used on this tour across vocals and instruments, including the Waves Platinum bundle, Crane Song Phoenix and Trillium Lane Labs Space impulse response reverb.)
{mosimage}Johnson also started using a new mic combination on Vince Gill's guitar amps for this tour. He found that blending the new Shure KSM313 ribbon microphone with a standard SM57 captured the full tone from Gill's amps with just enough edge to drive the mix. Besides keeping consistent mic placement on the amps, Johnson also rides the faders to get the right balance for each song, especially given the varied program on this tour.
Compressed Punch
Another mix technique used by Johnson for the drum kit proved very effective. Since the song styles ranged from driving rock to smooth jazz and contemplative ballads, Billy Thomas (Gill's drummer and occasional background vocalist) uses sticks and brushes throughout the program. Johnson fits the drums in the mix by blending the kit with a dual-mono compressed drum group, allowing him to easily add a more compressed punch to the kit without losing the full range on more dynamic ballads. In addition, Johnson dual-mics the kick drum with the Shure Beta 52 and KSM32 to capture both the punch and softer low end that keeps the kick in place in the mix.
Gill's monitor engineer, Sam Parker, also uses an Avid Profile console to drive 16 monitor mixes for the band. For this tour, Parker chose an L-Acoustics 115XT dual wedge configuration for Gill, and mixed Sound Image PD15 and PD12 wedges for the band and background vocalists. Parker also set up an IEM mix for Amy Grant, which she used along with the downstage wedge. Even in the relatively small theater setting, Parker's stage volume did not bleed into Johnson's FOH mix on the floor, a testament to his ability to give the band clean and precise mixes throughout the show.
Johnson and his team return to the road with Vince Gill at the end of January, and are sure to continue delivering a consistent, powerful sound that keeps Gill's fans on their feet.
Vince Gill and Amy Grant
Twelve Days of Christmas
Crew
FOH Engineer/Production Manager: Hugh Johnson
Monitor Engineer: Sam Parker
Audio Vendor: Sound Image
Sound Image Crew: Andrew Dowling, Danny Poland, Todd Wines
Gear
FOH/Monitor consoles: Avid Venue Profile
Tour PA: 24 JBL VerTec 4889, 12 JBL VerTec 4880, 2 Sound Image G5, 2 Sound Image Theater Sub, 8 Sound Image 1160
FOH/Monitor Amps: Crown I-Tech HD 12000 w/System Architect
Vince's Wedges: L-Acoustics 115XT
Band Wedges: Sound Image PD15, Sound Image PD12
Vocal Mics: Shure KSM 9
Vince's Guitar Amp Mics: Shure KSM313, Shure SM57
