In a time when pop music careers are measured in weeks instead of decades and the next big thing will fade by tomorrow, the second biggest tour of the year featured two old friends both in their 60s doing a show that felt like it could be in a small club – or sometimes in your living room. James Taylor and Carole King took a show that started out as a short series of dates in L.A. and put it on the road, consistently selling out 20K arenas and sounding great at every stop. Manning the console was veteran mixer David Morgan who had an advantage going in. He had the trust of everyone on stage.
"We are all old friends, and there was never any discussion of what was happening at front of house. There was the same vibe among the band and crew as between James and Carole. We just trust each other. We have all worked together for a long time, many of us are over 60, and the music is ingrained in us. It is embodied. It is music that is part of our souls and part of our lives."
We caught up with David for this interview about a month after the tour ended and he was back in Las Vegas with Cher. He has been here enough over the past three years that he might as well be a resident, and after comparing hockey injuries (his, the real deal; and mine, a broom hockey-busted finger from 30 years ago) and checking out his very nice Gretsch White Falcon, we got to talk abut audio, art and "playing the band."
FOH: I know you had worked with James in the past, but last time we talked, you were doing both Bette and Cher at Caesars. Was it just a timing thing that allowed you to go back out with James?
David Morgan: Well, I had to ask Cher for the time off. Fortunately, my Clair Bros. crew chief over at Caesars, Joe Dougherty, is a very good front of house engineer, and he was able to step in. He had actually heard the show more than I had because he was there when Dave Kob was mixing it before I took over in 2009. And he did a really fine job.
Getting the call to do this tour must have been a highlight. I mean this is like the tour of a lifetime.
We had done the shows in 2007 at the Troubadour for the 50th anniversary of Doug Weston's little hole in the wall that had been so successful over the years. It was a huge event. A Who's Who of Hollywood was at that event. It was such a great vibe, and we knew we had done something special. So we were all expecting that something was going to happen. It was never meant to be anything more than that string of shows, but it became kind of urban legend. It had to happen sooner or later, and it turned out to be later taking from 2007 until 2010 to really make it get up and go.
How is it working with the two of them together?
The relationship between James and Carole is just so beautiful to watch. They are such good friends, and they trust each other implicitly. One knows when to defer to the other, one knows when to encourage the other, one knows when to guide the other. It really is a wonderful symbiosis to watch. We all learned from it and benefited from it and enjoyed it as it all happened. The whole tour was a labor of love for everybody.
The system was pretty complex. In the round, with three zones in each quadrant – the main array, a front fill, and then a second front fill for a special VIP section that was sold for charity in each city.
We put it all together in Boise when we were doing production rehearsals. When I arrived in Idaho, Howard Page from Clair Global had already been there for a few days. He had "ballparked" a few things in and done the original SMAART work on the system. It was postulated that the mathematical relationship between the subs under the stage and on the outer ring would always stay the same, and the relationship between the front fills in the inner ring and those in the outer ring would stay the same. That was the theory. Of course once we got out there, things did change, so we had to re-time-align things. But once we had that together, it did stay the same.
So what we were dealing with day-to-day was gain and EQ. We would change time based on the height of the main array, and that could mean changing the outer ring boxes. And of course, if you change those, you have to change the inner ring boxes. But we knew the relationship between each section, so it was never a situation where we had to deal with the system box-by-box every day. Getting into good habits about placement and being consistent within the height variations was key. Once we knew the height to the bottom of the main arrays, we had formulae to tell us where to put everything else.
The MGM, where you saw the show, was very much a different story, because it is much smaller – only 10,000 seats – than the other venues on this tour. We had to do much more "hand" work than usual on that show. The golf range finder you saw is my "fall back." I would get distances – from FOH to the main array, from the main array to the outer ring, from FOH to the outer ring – and then do the math. But in a custom situation like that, you are really tuning the system by ear. It really doesn't matter what the math says. When your ear says it's right, then it's right.
We're back to the whole "appropriate tools" discussion. A lot of shows would have just used SMAART and made it look right on the screen, regardless of what it sounded like.
We did use SMAART when designing the system because it is faster than a tape measure and the golf range finder only displays in feet, not in inches, or in tenths of inches. For that, we used it, and then we stopped using it. Howard did a wonderful job. I love working with Howard. He is incredibly meticulous and very talented. It's nice to know that the old men – Howard is my age, and Trip Khalaf is my age and Dave Kob is pushing our age (heck, even Rob Scovill is 50)- that we can all still hear and put on a formidable show.
The consistency of the sound coverage was amazing. I could hear a directional shift as I walked through the zones, but no tonal shift. It all sounded the same throughout the room.
Not only that, but if you put on the headphones and listened to the desk, it would sound the same, and if you played a CD of the show or the nightly Pro Tools HD multitrack through the system, it would sound the same. It's something I learned from people bitching about show tapes, you know? And I thought there have to be ways to make everything consistent throughout the audio chain, and I just kind of made that a personal quest of mine.
It's the same as you would do in a recording studio. When you shoot the room, the idea is to have your monitors sound like your tapes. And it should be consistent from the big monitors to the nearfields to the Auratones. Tonally, everything should be consistent. Luckily, I worked in studios in the 1970s doing everything from tape copies to tracking sessions, so I had that mindset.
That consistency was my goal coming out of the studios and going to work for A1 back in the late 1970s. I try to explain that to guys who were setting crossovers and starting with the low end all the way up. They said, "We have to start with a big bottom end," and I said, "No, we have to make it sound natural. Start with material you know really well, and try to make it sound natural."
That has been my quest. Earlier PAs couldn't sound natural. There were such huge holes in the response and a huge technology gap. Especially all the point source PAs, where you would walk across the room and hear the audio smearing and comb filtering all the way across, canceling frequencies left and right. It was a nightmare.
When constant directivity horns came out, we started to have a chance. That is when systems like the Prism system came out, and the second version of the Clair S4, and when Dirk Schubert and I built our Steradian PA. With the constant directivity horn and much more sophisticated crossovers – Dirk is a mathematical genius, and is and remains one of the most knowledgeable filter designers in the world. All of these really brilliant people started to come into the business in the early 1980s – all of a sudden, we had systems that sounded good.
Once we had systems with the potential to really sound great, it came down to the art of the engineer. Could you realize that potential? I started to become really satisfied with the output from the entire PA when I started to use Maryland Sound's system in the late 1980s. I switched my clients over to them, and we were using what was called the "high pack/low pack" system. A beautiful PA. The depth and detail I could get with that system, with Paul Simon in Graceland and Whitney Houston and the people I was working with at that time.
I was really pleased with what it could do. That was also when I could start making tapes that sounded like the show. And since then, it has only gotten easier. The modern line arrays we work with now provide even and predictable distribution both in terms of frequency and SPL and allow engineers to create a consistently high quality audio product that was unthinkable 30 years ago.
It changes everything…
Yes. I can concentrate on the instruments instead of the PA. Mic choice becomes even more critical. Any transducer choice is more critical. You want better direct boxes – I use all Radial. We want more accurate and detailed reproduction for James' guitar, which is why we migrated to the Fishman Aura system in 2005 and then we added a Radial PZ-Pre… and it's gorgeous. A pre-amp made for a piezo pickup.
What a concept…
Yeah, imagine that. Someone actually looked at the frequency and impedance response of a piezo pickup and matched a pre-amp to those numbers. It all means that I have to really keep up with the technology and make sure our audio product is as good as the tools can make it.
Some of these new PA's… The K-1 is gorgeous. The d&b J is gorgeous. The system on this tour, the Clair i3, is one of the most detailed systems I used. I have heard that the Martin MLA is amazing.
And the other end of the chain. You were one of the first ones to really embrace these Earthworks mics. You use them on piano and drums…
Absolutely. And a SR40V on James' vocal. I am really happy that the relationship with Earthworks occurred in the first place, which is in no small part due to you. (David Morgan reviewed the Earthworks piano miking system for FOH's May 2009 Road Test feature while mixing Bette Midler -ed.) But to be able to feature their products with people like Carole and James… Granted, Carole's vocal sounded better through the Telefunken M80, but the piano sound through the PM40 is just beautiful. And Russ Kunkel's drums sounded like he was playing 10 feet away from you in a rehearsal studio.
For me, for the kind of acts I work with, realism is everything. I want realism, transparency and honest frequency response. I get all of these things with the Earthworks products. I couldn't be happier with the results. (See the video on www.fohonline.com/tv for more on David Morgan's love affair with the Earthwork's mics.)
I remember at the show there was someone in the audience right behind you who was chattering and just would not shut up, and you finally put a flashlight beam on her and told her to knock it off in no uncertain terms. I loved that.
When we do the quiet songs in that show, usually you can hear a pin drop in a 20,000 seat arena. And for me to be able to make the dynamics of the show work the way I want, I can't ride the music over someone yelling behind me. And my concentration needs to be focused solely on Carole and James.
You could see that. During the show you were just in a zone. As if you were a performer yourself.
That's how I approach mixing. It is a very organic thing for me. As a musician, the way I look at my role is that the console is my instrument and I play the band. It's not a static thing for me at all. I don't do anything by the numbers. Everything is done by feel and by ear. It is all about trying to create the perfect marriage between the music and the hall. And if someone is nattering behind me, it is like a mosquito when you are trying to sleep. At that point, it is him or me, or her or me, and my next step would be to call security.
I don't understand behavior like that. I mean I know we live in an age with no manners, but why would you want to pay the kind of money it costs to see James Taylor and Carole King in Vegas and then sit and talk through show like you were in your living room watching TV?
Anything else you want to talk about?
There's really no secret to what I do. What I do is based on the fact that I started playing piano when I was six years old. Having been a songwriter and an arranger and the guy in the band who owned the PA and most of the gear, I know how all the instruments are supposed to sound. I know how voices work together and how various parts work together. The secret of really good engineering is often found in small moves like adjusting the balance between two or three voices very gradually, or almost imperceptibly, so that one dominates ever so briefly. It is also in meticulously listening to find those little magic moments in every song that become unforgettable experiences. In the end, all I try to do is make instruments sound like instruments and voices sound like voices while preserving the performances and relationships that are being created on the stage.
You brought up that you and some of the other premier engineers in the business are 60 or pushing it. Do you see yourself ramping down anytime soon?
No. I'm still having the time of my life doing this.
