When it comes to the world of live performance audio – be it from a perspective on production, mixing and even system and console design – Howard Page is one of "the guys." To say he has an impressive résumé is such an understatement that it is actually laughable. When A-list mixers including guys like Cubby Colby invoke your name as one of the people they really learned something from, then you know your legacy is pretty much assured.
But I did not meet Howard as the senior director of engineering for Clair. I met him under circumstances that tell you a lot more about the man than a list of the shows he's mixed and the gear he has designed.
Howard and I have a mutual friend who owns a small sound company in Utah. I have never heard the story of how they crossed paths in the first place, but I met Paul Overson on a church gig in Pasadena, Calif., where he had trucked in a system for a two-week run of rehearsals and shows for a musical production. I have talked before about how this particular denomination can be not just technically backward but actively hostile toward putting pro production gear and personnel into their activities. I had been asked to mix monitors for the show, and it was a CF of such epic proportions that it deserves a story unto itself.
More than a year later, I got a call from Paul to come and help out on his biggest gig ever – a three-day cowboy poetry festival in Heber City, a wide spot in the road north of Salt Lake. Paul had done the gig for several years, but they had made it much bigger that year, including using an orchestra to back their headline music act. He's good at what he does, but he was in need of some help. I could not help on the orchestra thing, but I did offer to come out and help by taking one of the smaller stages.
Now, keep in mind, small-town. cowboy poetry, headliner is a B-list country artist, and the whole thing takes place in the gym, auditorium and cafeteria of the local high school. And when I got there, I found Paul very busy getting the orchestra part together, and working just as hard and showing him how to do the best job possible with limited gear was Howard Page. He is known throughout the audio world and has toured acts ranging from the Bee Gees (for 25 years) to Van Halen to Mariah Carey. And there he was in Heber City passing along his experience and knowledge and helping out a friend. That is paying it forward in a very big way.
We spent a few minutes with Howard just before the Sting show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The show, featuring Sting with his band and the Royal Philharmonic, was a joy – one of the few shows that has really blown me away in a long time. And as good as the show was, it was equally as cool to see an engineer as immersed in the music as Howard was. It was a great reminder of what it is all about.
I want to concentrate on the orchestra side of things. Had you worked with Sting before this?
Yes. Middle of last year I started doing some one-offs and rock shows and then toward the end of last year we did a very complex project in cathedrals in England and in New York called "If On a Winter's Night" that involved a mini-orchestra and the group. That came off quite well from an audio standpoint and he asked if I would come and do this tour, which is very challenging technically, because I am running almost 80 inputs and a lot of different balances coming off the stage. A lot of different acoustic levels. I have everything from violins to percussion instruments to guitars, so it is quite a challenge.
So you are melding the rock band with the orchestra. How do you make that happen?
In the beginning of the tour when we were setting it all up, I laid down the absolute control of stage levels. So we bought two very small guitar amplifiers and we have those padded down to 5 watts. So they still sound good, but everything is at a lower dynamic. So the dynamic of the group sits much better naturally with the dynamic of the orchestra. Even though you can turn things up and down, if the dynamic is not coming from the stage, then when you mix them together, you are fighting the dynamic between the two all night no matter what you do.
So we have a lot of control. We are using very small self-powered speakers for the monitoring of the orchestra and all that is in that is a bit of "feel" rhythm so that the orchestra gets the feel of the time of the songs but it doesn't amplify the stage at all.
Well, not only are you fighting stage dynamics, but this is an arena – not a good room for an orchestra. Has that been a challenge as well?
Yes, it was a challenge. What we did in the beginning was, I spent quite a lot of money on the best string mics I had ever heard, which are the DPA 4099Vs. (The tour is carrying approximately $40K in DPA mics -ed.) They literally save my life every night. And when they sound so good, you get the real sound of the violin. Earlier model clip-on mics for strings gave you a really screechy, rough, bow-y sound. So you never really got that warm sound of the actual instrument – the real sound of what a violin should be. The 4099s – because they clip on from the side – you can get over the "f" holes and get the real, beautiful, natural sound of the instrument. Plus, because they are all individually miked – if I'm really careful and get the balance in the section right, and the balance between the sections, you can hear all the nuances of the arrangements in every song, which is not possible with overhead mics.
Overhead mics would be the traditional way of miking an orchestra, but unfortunately, in some of these venues, to get the level right, you would be sitting in feedback – or just on the edge of feedback – most of the night. And you would not have control of the elements of the orchestra. So much of the arrangements of these songs that Sting is doing, which are not straight-ahead rock songs – they are album tracks that would never work in the rock show – and he has had Rob Mathers and various other arrangers do some pretty "out there' arrangements of his songs. Sometimes the violas have to be stronger, and sometimes the cellos. What the DPA mics do is give me total control of all the nuances within the orchestra arrangement.
It is vital that a sound mixer be really familiar with the music of the artist they are mixing. But in a case like this, where all the music has been "re-imagined" – does that play into you approach?
Yes. Usually we are in production rehearsals for a couple of weeks, and you make subtle notes to yourself. You build up notes. But you have to be careful early on – when the orchestra and the group are learning to play together and Sting is setting up the arrangements and getting all the fine-tuning going on – not to make too many notes. It is a fatal mistake to make too many notes too early, because you might think that a certain part is dominant, when, in actual fact, when everything settles down, that is not how the orchestra balances with the group at all. You learn after a few shows, when everything settles down, where the key points are of the sectional arrangements of the songs.
I make notes to myself on solos – clarinet feature here or another little part there. I have a cue control program that I wrote that pulls up the MIDI commands on my TC 6000, but it also gives me notes and key guidelines – "look out for the solo here" or "acoustic guitar in the beginning" of another song.
I relate it to being an airline pilot. When you take off – even though you have been flying for 30 or 40 years – you still refer to an absolute checklist. And you must, because even the best person can be distracted, and then you miss a key element. It's wonderful to have it right there in front of me. I can get consistency from night to night to night.
On most shows, you are on the Clair i-3 small line array, which you are more than familiar with, but what if you have to use another system?
Many systems are presented to you with what I call a rock ‘n' roll tilt on them, which means – for a show like this – way too much low end. It sounds great on a rock ‘n' roll show, but that low end – with 78 wide open mic inputs – is going to hurt me badly. I'll be fighting it all night. So I tailor that back to more of a studio monitor reference. Even on rock shows these days, I set my systems up as virtually studio reference monitors. If I want a big fat bottom end on something, I put it on the channel, and that way it translates to any recordings I do or any sounds I deliver to anyone else. It works very well.
Wait, you didn't think that was everything, did you? For more with Howard, including his thoughts on the differences between tuning and mixing and learning to read an audience, go to www.fohonline.com/tv.
