Rod Stewart’s FOH mixer Lars Brogaard keeps busy on the road.
He is one of the principal owners of one of Great Britain’s largest sound companies, Major Tom (as in “ground control to…”), he has his hands in system and console development, and he has been the front-of-house guy for Rod Stewart for 23 years. This is one guy who has no time for TV watching. FOH caught up with Lars Brogaard on Rod’s “Greatest Hits 2008” tour stop in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand where he was using a DiGiCo SD7 (backed up by a D5) to drive a Meyer Milo rig for a sold-out crowd.
Lars: “You don’t live out here do you
Bill: “Yes, I do.”
Lars: “How come you don’t have a suntan if you live here?”
Bill: “That’s… you know what… you don’t come outside very much.”
Lars: “That’s true. It is really just too hot for sun tanning.”
FOH: Exactly, yeah. So… this is like what, the second or third time you guys have been here in a year?
LB: Probably something like that — we come here a lot. Rod doesn’t really stop touring, so we are always on the move one way or the other.
Yeah, this is basically the never-ending tour.
I guess so, yes. I have been with Rod since '85. It has more or less been a full-time job, and more and more when we’re not on tour we do private shows around the world.
It has to be quite the juggling act because you are one of the principals in Major Tom right?
Yes.
How do you pull that off?
You work hard! We are a unique company in that everyone that works with us is an engineer in one way or another. We don’t have big overheads because everybody works, hands on. We don’t have sales managers and all that kind of stuff. Whatever it takes, we all go and get involved.
I love to hear that.
A couple of weeks ago, we had a tour starting and two sea freight containers to load and ship out, although there were only two of us in the office that day. The two of us loaded both sea freight containers on our own. It's tough at times, but that’s what it takes. We often have seven or eight projects going on at the same time, anything from control packages or racks-and-stacks systems through to complete stadium touring packages. All these people say they've got 60 tours at the same time, which I take with a pinch of salt.
Let’s talk gear. I know you have been on the D5 for a long time.
Yes. I helped develop it, and I’ve got the first D5 sitting over there. I also have the first SD7 sitting right there… I do a lot of work with DiGiCo.
So, were you part of the team that developed the SD7?
No, I had nothing to do with it whatsoever. They did all that in-house and kept it top secret. Nobody saw the SD7 until the very last minute. They asked a lot of people what they wanted to see on it, but they did all the design themselves. It is absolutely amazing and it sounds fantastic. In comparison to the D5, the high-end and low-end on the SD7 are better and the high-pass and low-pass filters are now 24 dB/octave rather than 12 dB/octave.
Now, having been somebody who has used the D5 for a long time, was there a learning curve going to the SD7?
No, they are very similar in operation.
Now are you using all of the plug-ins and everything or are you carrying a lot of extra outboard gear?
No, I use very little outboard gear. I have a Smart compressor on Rod's voice, and I have a TC System 6000 for vocal reverb that I’ve had forever. Everything else is on the console.
A tour like this would have taken up twice that much space just a couple of years ago.
To do what we are doing now, we would have to use two XL4s and…
Have roller skates…
Yes, and four big racks of outboard gear.
As I was walking up, I saw a D5 and a SD7…
I have the D5 there because I can.
Okay.
We were the first ones to take SD7 out, beta-testing software versions, so we kept the D5 running in parallel just in case. We took the D7 down to Australia in January and ran that parallel using the D5 while we programmed it up. After a few shows, when I felt it was the right time, I swapped over and I have never gone back and I have never had a problem.
No problem, no crashing, no…
No, no, no, nothing. But the D5 was in the truck, so…
Might as well bring it out.
I think I am getting more conservative now. I was the first one to do the same with the D5; I have done my pioneering here and I have the opportunity to use all sorts of new stuff. As you get older, less actually becomes more. You know you won't have the latest gimmicks and all this and all that; it doesn’t make you sound any better.
I've got to the point where I don’t want to carry anymore than I absolutely have to.
But it is amazing. You used to get people that wanted the latest TC or the latest Lexicon, and you don’t see that anymore. You would buy the stuff because that is what you have to do to get the tour, and it sits on the shelf and might get another week’s rental in a year. The equipment never gets paid for. It is just a bad investment.
I have had sound company owners tell me about getting a smaller tour and having to buy a $3,000-$4,000 piece of outboard gear to get the tour, and getting out there and finding that the front-of-house guy didn’t even know how to use it.
Yes. I had one guy who wanted the Lexicon 960 when they first came in. I asked why and he said, ‘Well, it looks great.’ Luckily, I think that those days have gone and I hope that they are not going to come back.
Outside the console, what are we running for PA?
Meyer MILO.
Meyer MILO. Yeah, Rod's basically a Meyer guy, right?
No. I am a Meyer guy. We have been having great success with this since we started using it here. It has a great throw and is really musical out of the box. You can go in and not EQ anything if you really wanted to and get away with it.
How loud is the show?
Last night, we were 104 C-weighted. I think it is very comfortable for the audience that we have these days. They are not looking to be pinned to the back wall, and so we tailor the listening experience to suit their demographic. Obviously, there are dynamics within the show, but we usually average between 104 dBa and 106 dBa.
Now, monitoring-wise, I don’t see any wedges out there…
No. Everyone is on personal monitors.
You like that? Help you out front?
It helps me because it helps the band and it helps Rod. I have been fortunate to work with some great engineers, among them David Bryson, who is not here now, but who looked after Rod’s monitors for many years. He and I worked together for 20-odd years, and he took Rod from a huge monitor system on to in-ears during that time.
What are you doing for front fills down here?
We use UPA-1Ps along the front. I figure we've got eight today.
Eight across, OK and that will cover the front row?
Yes, easily. We also have Milo 120s in the flown arrays for down fill.
Now, you’ve got subs on the deck and in the air?
We have six in the air and four on the ground per side.
Now are you guys doing the thing I am seeing a lot of, where there is one monitor guy for the band and one guy for the star?
Yeah, you saw that after we started it.
Really?
Yeah. We also are the first band to have everybody on IEMs. It was something we had to do because we tried having Rod on in-ears and the band on wedges, but every time Rod walked past a wedge he would say, ‘it sounds weird over here, it sounds weird there,’ so now the way to do it for us is to have the band on IEMs and no wedges on stage at all.
It means you are not constantly trying to overcome stage volume out front.
But the thing is, if you start being too loud in the house, you kill them on stage. So, you really have to have a good working relationship with the monitor engineers.
