They may have whisper-clean sound, but Celtic Woman’s not a secret anymore.
It might be understandable if you have not yet heard of Celtic Woman, but the “secret” that has enthralled millions of PBS viewers and myriad concertgoers will not be one for much longer. The group’s debut was the #1 album on Billboard’s World Music chart for 68 weeks, only to be bumped off by their Christmas album, then that release was knocked from the top slot by the group’s A Woman’s Journey earlier this year. Having notched three successful albums (including a recent Top 10 rock/pop entry) through massive public television exposure, the Irish folk/pop project offering both covers and originals has beguiled audiences with a quartet of pretty voices, a vigorous violinist, pulse-racing percussion and a smooth mixture of energetic and ethereal moments. Currently wrapping up a 100-plus show tour, Celtic Woman is becoming one of the biggest (yet quietest) pop sensations around.
What is most striking for any audience member upon seeing the show — other than the presence of five gorgeous women and eight choir members and six supporting musicians — is how clear the sound is. Even a dozen rows back at the venerated Radio City Music Hall, the mix was clean and far from the in-your-face experience one could expect.
“The key to this thing is the dynamics, and having a great band really makes all the difference in the world,” remarks FOH engineer Wayne Pauley, who works with monitor engineer Andreas Linde-Buchner. “They’re top-notch musicians, the best. For an audio person, the difference between a good musician and a great musician is not really their ability to play. It’s knowing when and what to play, and also when not to play, because that space is what gives you the depth and the dynamics.”
Having a great audio engineer juggling 18 musicians onstage also helps. “Wayne does a fabulous job of integrating all the different systems that I put up for him everyday into an amazing audio picture for the challenges he has to deal with,” says Gord Adams, the Masque Sound live systems engineer on the tour. “The stage is covered with Sennheiser and DPA mics on all the talent, and that provides any engineer with the challenge between getting the full sound that he wants versus the mics hearing the room. He’s a top-notch engineer, and I have a lot of respect for him.”
Pauley, who sonically interprets the album vision of musical director/pianist David Downes and producer Andrew Boland, has been running a Yamaha PM1D with 5K mic pres, “which makes an enormous difference, in my personal opinion,” he states. “It sounds more like an old-school analog console, that sound us old-timers are used to getting from some of the older consoles. The mic pres are not perfect on purpose, and that makes the whole a lot more warm and natural sounding. A lot of times, you get certain digital consoles where everything comes out being very sterile, and that is not the case with this. I think Yamaha has really stepped up to the plate in this scenario and done pretty well.” Most of the mics onstage are Sennheiser, with the exception of the wireless mics on the main singers, which are DPAs, but with Sennheiser wireless transmitters. The PM1D is set up for 96 inputs, and the total for the tour hits in the mid-80s.
This is the first time that I’ve been involved in anything that spans more than four genres of music within one show,” states Pauley, who has worked with numerous rock and country acts in the past, including Trisha Yearwood, Bo Bice, and the Nashville Star tour. “It’s a completely different approach than I’ve been used to. Normally you get involved in a show, and it’s a specific genre, or maybe it’s a genre stretching into one more. You get sounds that you think are good and appropriate for what’s going on and run with it. You might change some overalls here and there, but you don’t change the basis of the entire mix from song to song. With this show, you literally have to treat each song like its own entity, and what might be appropriate for one song is completely inappropriate for the next. The idea is for it to be a hybrid of a lot of different things — one being a very Broadway-type experience, another being a very pop concert type of experience — and to try to make the segues between the two meld, so to speak.”
Pauley puts it best: the show is not over produced. Nevertheless, the show is very rehearsed in the sense that a lot of rehearsal time is invested in the production, which allows everyone involved to maintain a high level of consistency night after night. After all, that is what people come to see.
Despite the varying size of venues, ranging from amphitheatres to arenas, the smaller of which are not large enough to hold the entire stage set-up, the tour has been running pretty smoothly. “The day’s pattern is: I come in the morning, use some laser tools to measure the room, use L-ACOUSTICS Soundvision to come up with a plan, then review that with Wayne,” reports Adams. “Sometimes, due to the room’s geography or limitations of the rigging points, we have to make a compromise to make that work. Then we start unloading the trucks. Usually, we wait for lighting to get in and deal with riggers at that point, get our points set, and away we go. Usually it’s about a four-hour build for everything. Audio is only about an hour or an hour and a half’s work because there’s a lot of standing around waiting for other things to come into play.”
There are three L-ACOUSTICS arcs on each side of the stage. “That’s a ground stack on each side, adjacent to or on top of the subs depending on the day,” says Adams. “In arenas, it’s much different. We have 24 L-ACOUSTICS Ds and 24 V-DOSC speakers, as well as a total of six arcs, 12 of the SB218 subs, and then we use Meyer UPMs.”
Adams agrees that the Celtic Woman sound is not overkill, unlike so many other pop and rock acts. “We were amazed at how quiet the system at idle was,” he remarks. “I’ve gone to many shows, and you can hear an audible little hiss, even as the amps are at idle, through the P.A. We use the Camco Vortex 6 amplifiers, which are great, and we also carry around with us an audio isolation transformer. I don’t use the house system neutral power, I make my own, and so we’re able to have a fairly central neutral for the audio. There’s no hum or buzz everyday. It’s a one-to-one isolation transformer. I just give it the three hot phases and a ground for reference, and it quiets the center point of that and creates its own neutral. It’s a big piece of steel to lug around every day, but it’s certainly worth it. It’s whisper clean.”
The systems engineer says he feels privileged to work with Masque Sound because it has been in business for a long time and knows how to get the sound systems to work correctly. “Because they have such a large inventory of wire there, the way they’ve chosen to connect all their stuff is a standard format throughout the company,” states Adams. “They use Wireworks G series connectors for signal. Their wire people are stellar, so all that stuff is zero maintenance for me. As a road guy, that is something I greatly appreciate. I don’t have to rebuild connectors on a daily basis. So I basically deploy it every day and put it away, and as long as I take care of the equipment, I’m not having to rebuild any of it. That’s a joy.”
Another plus on the tour has been the smooth wireless communication software set up by the company, which allows the crew to sync up disparate wireless systems and integrate them effortlessly. Jason Eskew, wireless specialist for Masque Sound, developed the frequency coordination software called the PWS IAS 4.4 Intermodulation Analysis System, which has made the wireless crew communication on Celtic Woman a breeze. A long-time soundman with A2 experience, Eskew began working on the software seven or eight years go.
“As a developer I knew that there was a better way than the tools that were available to me, which really, truly sucked,” recalls Eskew. “They were DOS-based tools that were taking me four hours to do a coordination. Now I can do that same coordination in less than 10 minutes. Everything about the software came about to make my life easier initially, but there are other people who have to do the same type of work, so it applies to customers as well. For a long time, I used it internally, and then I started supplying a copy to other people within the company. It just made their lives so much easier as well. Finally, last fall, I convinced them to release it for sale.”
Eskew’s system runs on a laptop and works as a planning tool. “You sit down, do a coordination, figure out which frequencies are good for a given location, dial up your racks, and then test them,” explains Eskew. “Rather than picking frequencies just at random or by trial and error, it saves you a huge amount of time in setting up your system. More importantly, on tour you could do a coordination for the next couple of cities down the road. In today’s environment, where there are some serious chunks of spectrum missing in a given city, you’re able to plan ahead and say, ‘When I get to Dallas, I’m not going to be able to use this ear rack over here or these instrument mics because they’re just going to get pounded by DTV. I can call the shop and get a spare set in the different frequency range shipped to meet me in that city, do what I have to do, and ship it back.’ It gives you a chance to plan rather than showing up Saturday for a Sunday concert. There ain’t no shipping something in then. If you can’t make it work, you’re stuck.”
The Celtic Woman crew is pleased with the software’s results. “When you have roughly 40 channels of wireless going relatively all the time, you have to have the gear and the guy,” says Pauley. “It’s pretty much flawless.” Adams concurs, saying it’s flawless “to the point you plug it in, and Guy Gillen, our wireless tech, deals with scanning the room and his environment to make sure his frequency set is not going to get any hits or anything like that. He works fine everyday. He tends not to have to scramble too much.”
Beyond the audio synergy of the Celtic Woman, its crew agrees that the personal chemistry on tour has been great as well. “The music is pleasant, and all the people on the tour are a joy to be with,” declares Gord. “That really makes a difference. You can try as hard as you want to do the best you can do professionally, but if the people are difficult to get along with or unreasonable, that certainly takes the fun out of it. These people are wonderful to be with. They treat you well, and they have great consideration for the people who are working for them. I’ve got no complaints in that department at all. It’s certainly something I’d like to do again if it comes up.”
