Rainbow Production Services and Thunder Audio Team Up for Dane Cook’s Rough Around the Edges Tour
When I got the call asking me to go out and cover a tour by a
comedian named Dane Cook, I had two reactions. The first was, “Who the hell is Dane Cook.” And the second was, “It’s one guy and a mic. How hard can it be?” I was in for an education on both counts.
It’s All About the Coverage
I arrived onsite and hooked up with FOH Engineer Bruce Andrews just as they were getting ready to make noise. The show is in-the-round, and they are playing — and selling out — 14,000–15,000-seat arenas. Andrews, who spends much of his time running monitors for prog-rockers Queensryche, says that even with just one mic, this show is a lot harder.
“Arena’s are not built for music,” he says. “They are built for sports, and getting even a rock band to sound good can be a challenge. When you are looking at a comedian where every word has to be clear in every seat, it is much harder. Queensryche is easy compared to this. In a rock show, if a part of a lyric is a little indistinct or smeared, it is not a huge big deal. Here, if you miss one word, that could mean missing the punch line, and the joke falls flat for part of the audience. That is just not acceptable.”
So, how do you guarantee even coverage for 15,000 of your closest friends in rooms with reverb times meant to amp up a sports crowd, not make a single voice totally clear and distinct? With a system big enough for most rock concerts, that’s how.
{mosimage} Solid Sound, Nutty Show ⎯ Let’s Do This
Michael Martell is the president of New Hampshire-based Rainbow Production Services and also acted as the production director and designer for the tour. “It was decided early that we would need to build a system that answered to the uneven shape of an arena, working in-the-round,” he ex-plains. “That being the case, I thought of the system as needing to accommodate multiple zones in the near, moderate and far fields of the room.
My audio designers and I really wanted to create as many zones as reasonably possible, given the time constraints of a daily two-system tour. We decided to use two columns of 16 Meyer Mica to cover the extreme depth on the short ends of the room and four columns of 12 Meyer Milo with two Meyer Milo 120s at the base of each to cover the corners of the room.
A series of Meyer UPJs around the lip of the stage helped to fill in the gap between the bottom of the array coverage and the money seats close to the stage. We used six Meyer MJF-212A monitors to cover Dane on stage. The system really worked well with some of the newer arenas that just seem to climb forever along the center line of the arena floor. The Micas covered that area very well, while the Milos gave us the push we needed to get to the back corners of the room; the Milo 120s covered the floor very well.”
OK, let’s take a step back. Did he say two systems? He did. This was a whirlwind tour, covering some 25 cities (almost all single-night stands) in the space of about six weeks. Given the size and complexity of the system, they needed two rigs so one could be in transit to the next city while the other was in actual use. Enter Detroit’s Thunder Audio.
The Logistics of Leapfrogging
Thunder knows a bit about leapfrogging two systems, having done it on numerous Metallica tours over the years. Thunder V.P. Paul Owen is ada-mant that this kind of “two companies, two systems, one tour” situation was made a lot easier by the choice of gear.
“We have done duplicate stadium systems all over the world, and the most consistent results have been with the Meyer rigs. The great thing is that no matter where you get the box, you know that any two will sound exactly the same. Spoken word is always the hardest kind of performance be-cause it has to sound exactly the same in every seat. When Rainbow called and asked if we could provide a duplicate system, we were confident that we could do it and make it sound the same, regardless of which rig was in which venue.”
Of course, working with two sound companies is about a lot more than just gear. There has to be a level of trust and respect and a willingness to work as a team. “You have to do what is right for the artist,” says Owen. “As long as you keep that at the forefront, and everyone plays fair in the sandbox… I mean, there’s a lot of money being spread around, and as long as everyone plays nice and the pot is split fairly, there are no problems.
“This is a great, amicable working situation, and the relationship between the two companies is good. Who knows, you may see the two of us leap-frogging systems this summer.”
The routing for the tour was largely completed before it was ever contracted. It was clear that most of the dates were decided based on flights using a private jet for Dane. The original concept for the tour was to hire a different vendor in each city; Rainbow was asked to coordinate production needs for the entire tour and cover all the production for the Northeast dates from its warehouse in New England. “We knew right away that it had to be one system that could conform to the differing seatscape of all 25 arenas for the production to allow the artist to do his thing,” says Martell.
After quickly assessing the routing and determining that they could safely cover 16 of the 25 dates, Martell started calling other Meyer production houses to cover the remaining nine. “Paul Owen from Thunder was one of the first to get back to me,” he says. “I had initially contacted Paul to cover the first date in Toronto and a later date in Detroit from Thunder’s location in Michigan. Paul was an amazing help in that he was able to not only cover those dates and several others, but he was able to pull together a system that mirrored ours exactly — right down to the last speaker box. After gettinag through the first few dates, Paul and I had a quick discussion, and he agreed to help us out on the western portion of the run. When all was said and done, Thunder was able to cover us on eight of the remaining nine tour dates with some fairly extreme routing. This was a huge logistical relief in that I didn’t have to work out multiple contracts for services and work with a new crew every day.”
It’s All About the Artist
Owen maintains this as the mantra for any successful tour, and it is a concept that Rainbow also reflects. “The biggest mistake would have been to allow the gear to place a single demand on Dane and control how he performs,” says Owen. “The production package had to disappear as soon as Dane entered the arena floor each night, and I’m happy to say that it did just that,” agrees Martell.
“It was imperative that Dane not be able to tell that we were using two complete systems from start to finish.” continues Martell. “One guy standing alone with a microphone in front of 18,000 people every night is tough enough without having to worry about each system performing differently each night. It was clear from day one that Dane was well aware of what he was working with. He could hear the subtle differences in each room even with completely identical rigs.”
Andrews echoes that thought: “When he comes out for sound check, if there is anything just slightly off, he knows it right away. He tends to work the mic a lot, getting right on top of it and cupping it like a rapper for effect at certain points in the show. We have been able to make sure that the sound — even the extremes — are the same from night to night.”
A sense of continuity among the crew was also important. “Dane had to be able to roll in each and every day and see the same faces at front of house and throughout the rest of the production management, regardless of which rig was in the air.” In other words, no one had to think twice if they needed a question answered about production. They knew who to ask to get the answers right away.
“Managing a tour that required the spontaneity of working with a physical comedian like Dane, with a system that had to be tuned to make every seat in constantly changing 18,000 seat arenas sound perfect — on a tour that had some of the most extreme routing in my 25 year of touring — was a trying experience,” says Martell. “But it was a great deal of fun, and I look forward to doing it again.”
