Although they’ve toured together in 2004, 2005 and 2009, Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire are raising the art and technology of co-headlining to new heights on their 2015 “Heart and Soul” Tour currently motoring across the country.
With seven trucks and several buses for crew, both bands are navigating a tightly scheduled round of amphitheaters, with a few casinos and arenas — such as The LA Forum and Denver’s Pepsi Center — thrown in for added variety, which presents a significant challenge in terms of scaling each show for the venue and dealing with outdoor elements during a brutally hot summer. The tour kicked off at the Concord Pavilion (a 12,500-capacity shed near San Francisco) on July 15th and winds up next month, at the relatively intimate (2,400-seat) Borgata Event Center in Atlantic City on September 6th.
Mega-Mixing: The Real Challenge
Unlike the usual co-headlining tour, where typically one band goes on first, and just before intermission, the lead singer or a few featured players join in for a song, the Heart and Soul Tour takes this concept a lot farther. Each show opens and closes with “greatest hits” medleys featuring both bands with 21 musicians and vocalists on stage at the same time trading parts.
Extensive rehearsals were required to create a seamless coordination of instrumentation and stagecraft without anyone playing over or stepping on each other during these critical segments, which now flow smoothly and spontaneously, never failing to drive the audiences over the edge as they feel the familiar warmth of each monster hit wash over them.
The show’s closing medley encore includes “Free,” “Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?” and “25 or 6 to 4” combined with “September,” “Sing a Song” and “Shining Star.” As they used to say in the trade, it’s “hits, nothing but hits.”
Asked about the challenges of mixing these medleys, Chicago FOH engineer Nate Lettus explains, “We’re known for this and have done them with EW&F, the Doobie Brothers and REO Speedwagon, but there are moments when they can get very intriguing, especially this time around with all the people using wireless on the same stage.
“On the front-end, the musicians are really good about it because they’ve figured out who’s doing what, and there’s usually only one bass player playing with similar guitar and horn parts an octave apart. It’s really more an issue of showmanship where they’re trading vocals back and forth. For an Earth, Wind & Fire song, I’ll mute parts of my drum kit and pull the entire rhythm section, vocals and horns down a couple of dB as we need to.”
On this outing, the mega-medley mix is more complex. “It’s a little trickier on our songs this time around,” Lettus says, “because EW&F is doing more instrumental stuff on the Chicago tunes, so I’m actually taking a handful of their channels and handling inputs from both bands during our songs just for consistency’s sake. For example, on a certain tune, their bass player will come in halfway through the tune and mine will drop out so, so “TJ” (Terry “TJ” Jackson, FOH for EW&F) asked me if I minded doing it and I said this would be no problem.”
According to Lettus, there are however a few other issues to contend with. “The biggest challenge for the medleys and the shows in general is overall volume, trying to keep everything under control. A lot of energy comes up and we can end up with a big powerful sound, but it’s not a metal show and neither of these bands sound that good at really excessive volumes. That’s the biggest challenge out front. I find my levels are pretty consistent, especially with the Martin Audio MLA system, and I’m running everything off matrixes so I’m within 1 or 2 dB every day of setting and forgetting all my sends and it seems to be spot on.”
The System
The tour P.A. is indeed Martin Audio’s Multi-cellular Loudspeaker Array (MLA) system, provided for the tour by Delicate Productions of L.A. and San Francisco. Lettus had already mixed with Martin Audio’s MLA Compact system on an earlier Chicago tour, and was eager to try the full MLA rig on this one. Eighth Day Sound, a regular client of Earth Wind & Fire, supplied that band’s FOH and monitor gear.
In addition to the control provided by MLA’s built-in processing working in tandem with Martin Audio’s proprietary DISPLAY2 software for plotting the room, the U-NET digital networking maintains a live, bi-directional link with every individual MLA unit. DISPLAY2 provides a virtual environment for configuring, optimizing and predicting the system’s direct sound and calculates the filter parameters for each enclosure — down to the resolution of individual drive units. This also offers precise control over dispersion, not only in providing coverage to every seat, but also ensuring that sound does not spill into adjacent areas, which is increasingly a major issue with festivals and outdoor events.
All well and good, but the bottom line is the sonic performance. “The boxes sound really smooth from bottom to top,” says Lettus. “I’m actually rolling off some high-end here and there, because there’s so much of it, which is good because I’d rather have more than less. We’ve got plenty of low-end with six MLX subwoofers per side. The subs are punchy and tight and they really produce. The show just sounds so good and I’m barely doing anything, my inputs are just high passed and my outputs are barely touched on a day-to-day basis.”
According to Kyle Anderson, Delicate’s MLA audio tech, the setup for amphitheaters is “typically either 12 or 14 MLA including one MLD (downfill) cabinets per side with six to eight MLA Compacts for outfills and side hangs.” Six MLX subs are deployed per side ground-stacked on the floor or the stage, depending on space, the venue or sightlines — which can be a major concern as there are a lot of people on stage. “Typically we’ll do stacks two high and three wide but I prefer three high and two wide because it sounds a little better,” says Anderson.
“For The Forum [Inglewood, CA], we had 16 MLA per side, a side hang of 12 MLA Compact and a 270 degree hang of 10 MLA Compacts. In some of the amphitheaters we do use delay speakers, but I don’t always need them because MLA covers so well from front to back.”
Lettus uses a DiGiCo SD10 console running Waves upfront, with the entire system on a fiber optic loop and just one rack used for gain tracking.
“We’re real happy with the SD10,” he enthuses, “We bumped up to 96 kHz in the last two years and noticed a huge difference in the smoothness of the high-end. I’ve been a big DiGiCo advocate for years and I think we have a really good system out now between the consoles and the MLA system.”
The View from Monitorland
As mentioned earlier, the biggest challenge for the monitor engineers is finding and maintaining clear wireless channels during each show, especially the opening and closing sections. Scott Koopman, who handles monitors for Chicago, says, “I’ve been coordinating wireless frequencies for both bands and what started out as 50 is now down to 47 active channels on stage during the medleys. I’m self-taught and have my own way of getting the job done, but in this day and age — with the FCC buying up all the frequencies — it’s getting really hard to find and maintain clear channels. In the world of monitors which Terrence (Terrence Chism, monitors for EW&F) and I live in, that’s the hardest part of the job.”
Scott prides himself on a “very tight, very condensed setup, as minimal as I can get it, using everything to its maximum potential with a very small footprint.” For this tour, he’s combining a DiGiCo SD10 with 10 Sennheiser G3 in-ear wireless systems for the band members and Shure SR4D wireless systems for guitars and horns with two additional channels for vocalist’s headsets when both bands perform together with 23 channels total, just for Chicago.
“Terrence and I are both using DiGiCo consoles — he’s on an SD5 — with similar stage racks and we’re both running at 96k which gives us very high fidelity audio into the consoles. We can also connect to each other’s stage racks via the MADI split, which allows me to pick up to 96 inputs. Now I can take all of EW&F’s and my inputs and mix both bands at the same time for just my guys while Terrence is doing the same thing by taking all my inputs from his stage rack and creating a mix of Chicago to combine with his Earth, Wind & Fire inputs for his mix,” says Scott.
“It’s a pretty massive undertaking but this is the first time we’ve done it with full-digital MADI streaming. The fidelity and audio quality are amazing and the mixes sound great. It’s been very easy to come up with a good mix combining both bands this year. I’m really enjoying myself and glad that Terrence was willing to work together with us to make it happen.”
Asked about particular challenges for monitors this time out, Scott responds, “You’ve got a lot of microphones on stage with the potential to pick up ambience, especially in a venue where FOH is mixing louder than normal, we’re either getting a lot of crowd noise or the room is naturally loud. The sound can get messy really quickly, so I’m still working on the opening and close of the show with both bands onstage to kind of scoop out what mics I don’t really need to have open at the time to allow the spatial clarity that needs to be there in these mixes. That’s the major issue with doing something like this.
“Using the full MLA system has greatly improved rejection on stage, especially from the sub-bass, which is a very big deal with Chicago because it’s hard for the horn players to find their pitch when there’s a lot of washing up on stage. They feel they have to play over it, which can often cause more problems.”
Working side by side with Scott in monitor world down front and stage left, Terrence Chism echoes the difficulty of “trying to get clean frequencies for all of the wireless and keeping them clean for Chicago and ourselves. Scott and I are always communicating about wireless channels.”
EW&F is also equipped with Sennheiser G3 in-ear systems with a total of 23 wireless channels for the band including monitors, vocals, guitars, horns and a headworn mic for the guitarist.
Claiming “my guys are pretty consistent from night to night, which makes my job easier,” Chism feels the only thing that varies from one venue to the other is “how much room I get back into the microphone. With an arena, it’s more information than the vocal like ambient levels coming from the hall, the crowds, etc. It depends on the room. If it’s not acoustically treated, like most arenas, our mics will sound like ‘audience response night.’”
At FOH with EW&F
EW&F FOH Terry “TJ” Jackson had never mixed on the Martin Audio MLA system before this tour. “The first day I heard them, it sounded like a really clean sounding system,” he recalls. “A high fidelity-type sound, which I really like. One of the first things I noticed was how easy it is to get the vocal out — which is very important. At first, I wasn’t sure about the warmth of the speakers but since I’ve gotten more used to mixing with it, I’ve found out the system really does what you tell it to.”
The MLA transition did take a brief accommodation period. “It has a lot of high-end, which is determined by how it’s processed, so my normal EQ setting didn’t work with MLA, but now that I’ve used it, I have a setting for these speakers that works fine for me,” Jackson explains. “In general, I would definitely recommend the speakers without question. They’re very good. I’m still learning about the control but I can tell it’s controllable. It reminds me of ‘new generation’ speakers. The MLA speakers are really good, I’d put them on the rider.”
Jackson is using a Soundcraft Vi6 for the tour and in terms of working with both bands on stage, “this year has been different because I don’t have Chicago in my mix at all. I would normally have both bands and the biggest challenge is keeping the show seamless with similar levels for Chicago and us. I keep watching Nate and when we do the first song I can see where my levels are. Usually, I would have anyone who sings on one of our songs in my mix and my console. So I’m trying to make it seem like one big mix the whole time. It’s much smoother now after six or seven shows,” he confirms.
“With this many instruments and vocals on stage, you need to keep as much separation as possible between everything. That’s another quality of these speakers; they’re not too forgiving. If you mess up with them, they’ll let you know it. You get what you put into them, so you have to be more careful with your movements.”
It’s All About The Sound
Summarizing about the P.A., Anderson concludes, “MLA is a great sounding box right off the bat and makes a lot of things easier. It does the processing for me, so once I get my angles, set it up and do my optimization, it pretty much already sounds good everywhere in the room. I’ll still do some serious things to it like time aligning; adjust a few EQ settings for the room in the software. And once you put that stuff in, everywhere you tell it to sound good will sound good. All of which makes my life easy and works well for me.”
Anderson added a specific example about applying the Martin audio DISPLAY2 software to handle some issues from the July 28 performance at Denver’s multi-purpose, 15,000-plus seat Pepsi Center arena. “There was a top tier for the venue at the side hang which I hadn’t expected to be sold so I didn’t cover that zone, but when I found out that the ticket sales grew, we were able to splay the coverage upwards and cover that whole area just by using the DSP and software as the show was happening. You can’t really do that with any other speaker that I’ve used. It’s a real advantage to change the coverage quickly without changing the angles on the boxes or redeploying the speakers.”
Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire: Heart and Soul Tour 2015
CREW
- Sound Company: Delicate Productions (Eighth Day Sound supplied monitor and FOH gear for EW&F)
- FOH Engineer, Chicago: Nate Lettus
- FOH Engineer, EW&F: Terry “TJ” Jackson
- Monitor Engineer, Chicago: Scott Koopman
- Monitor Engineer, EW&F: Terrence Chism
- System Engineer: Kyle Anderson
- FOH Tech & Eighth Day Crew Chief: Bernarr Ferebee
- Monitor Techs: Pete Umlauf (Chicago); Nathan Fenchak (EW&F)
P.A. SYSTEM
- Main/Aux Hangs: (30) Martin Audio MLA (12 or 14/side)
- Side Hangs: (16) Martin Audio MLA Compacts (six to eight/side)
- Downfills: (2) Martin Audio MLD
- Subs: (12) Martin Audio MLX (six/side, groundstacked)
FOH GEAR
- FOH Console, Chicago: DiGiCo SD10 with Waves Server with platinum plug-in package; Waves DigiGrid MGB (multi-track recording & playback)
- FOH Console, EW&F: Soundcraft Vi6 with Studer preamps
- Drive System: Yamaha DME64N Digital Mix Engine, Martin Audio DISPLAY2 software.
MONITOR GEAR
Chicago
- Monitor Console: DiGiCo SD10
- Monitors: 10 Sennheiser EW300 G3 with Jerry Harvey Audio IEM’s
- Wireless Mics: (13) Shure UR4D wireless mic channels with DPA 4099 on horns, DPA 4088 on vocals
Earth, Wind & Fire
- Monitor Console: DiGiCo SD5 with Waves DigiGrid MGB (multi-track recording & playback)
- Monitors: (6) d&b M4 wedges; (6) Shure PT1000 IEM systems
- Wireless Mics: (8) Shure UR4D; (6) Sennheiser 3732; AKG C520L headset mics and Audio-Technica ATM 350C horn mics.
