Clair Global Hangs 224K Pounds of Surround Sound Quad Speakers
“I realized six months before going out on this tour that this was the heaviest show I have ever worked on,” says FOH Jon Lemon about the 224,000 pounds of speakers flying in the air. “It’s breaking records for the heaviest hang in many of the arenas we’re playing.” Roger Water’s This is Not a Drill is in the round, though literally it is made up of four stage sections that are an “x” formation. It’s a big band: Drums, bass player, two keyboards, sax, two backing vocalists and Roger Waters — who jumps between piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar and bass. Yet, the 25-truck/8-bus show with all those Clair Global speakers impressively felt loud without being loud. “The idea of the P.A. design is to deliver the most even sound possible throughout a given venue,” Lemon continues. “My style of mixing is to make it sound big but not necessarily loud, and I achieve that with various small touches of compression on the 2-bus.”
There are many challenges, including navigating around the huge video walls which hang directly above and correspond with the “x” stage set up … as if general RF challenges weren’t big enough. “That’s a big one as we’re looking for around 80 frequencies every day and RF gets harder with every passing year,” notes monitor engineer John Chadwick.
In the Round? “I Try To Avoid It”
Lemon grew up in the coastal city of Adelaide, Australia, and by age 13 he was making small amps in addition to being a “crappy bass player playing in crappy bands.” Interest in the former won out and he worked for a local audio company on the weekends. At 16 when Lemon was told he had macular degeneration and would be profoundly blind by 21, he did not let that slow him down in pursuing an interest in pro audio (he would retain some of his sight, though he’s legally blind). “I pushed into the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle without the sex,” he jokes. Starting in 1977, he worked for Jands, which has supplied pro audio and lighting for Australian and New Zealand acts since 1970. While with them, an early break was working with renowned classical guitarist John Williams, who during the 1970s had a progressive rock band called Sky. “He asked me to come to the UK and do a tour in Europe.” It was so successful, Lemon stayed. Next came Level 42, the band that really established him. From there he did Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares to U tour, Pet Shop Boys, The Cure and others.
One of the others was Depeche Mode who he was with in the early 1990s, during which time he got a call to go out with Pink Floyd. “I turned it down, because I had given my word to Depeche Mode to stay with them on their next tour,” he says. Smashing Pumpkins, Beck, and many others followed. In 2005, for the worldwide charity show Live 8, Pink Floyd reunited, and Lemon mixed that. In 2017, Lemon got the call to take the FOH chair for Waters’ Us + Them tour that year. He had just gotten home to Australian from another tour when he got the call asking if he could be on the plane that day. “I said, well I have to do laundry, so I need 24 hours.” He made it to the third show, and “did a lot of homework in hotel room with Pro Tools.” He’s worked with Waters since.
For this show, Lemon is once again on a DiGiCo console. “I’ve been using their boards pretty much since their inception of the D5 back in 2003,” he says. “On Beck’s tour that year I think I had the second console they made.” He’s currently out with DiGiCo’s Quantum 5. Otherwise his toolbox contains the Midas XL42, Maag EQ and Alan Smart C2 compressor, among a few other gadgets.
As for mixing an act in the round, “quite honestly, I have tried to avoid it! It’s tough for a sound person to do.” But after testing the Clair Global system designed for this specific spectacular, Lemon was onboard. Being used are Clair Cohesion 12s with 36 double-18 CP-218 subs spread around. “From talking to other engineers about playing in the round, one of the things I knew is I couldn’t have speaker cabinets on stage. Roger and the band were completely cool with that.” Audio chief Jeff Stearns went with a lot of isolation cabinets under the stage for guitars, keyboards and Waters’ bass. There are also eight hangs of Cohesion 10s on the perimeter of the arena, facing back toward the band and the four quad systems in the corners. “It’s very big and effective, though it certainly took me a while to nail the mix down.”
Monitor World: Down Under
A “secret” door beneath the stage offers access to monitor world. Once there, one finds 22 channels of Wisycom IEMs and 32 channels of Shure Axient D wireless. An additional eight channels of Wisycom at FOH feed signals to the surround system.
In that hidden underworld, you’ll find Chadwick. He grew up in Manchester, England, and went to Loughborough University. His guitar playing was decent enough to get him into the school’s Musician’s Club, which had a P.A. that he figured out how to run. Once a week, Chadwick mixed comedy shows at the Students’ Union and for student bands. “Regular visitors to the Students’ Union were audio company W&T Ultrasonics who dealt with the ‘real’ bands,” he says. After learning how their system went together during their visits, they took Chadwick out to fill in on some of their other shows and this grew into regular FOH work with The Manfreds (“Manfred Mann without the Mann”) and The Blues Band in various venues around the UK during the late 90s.
A longtime friend at W&T, Martin Walker, “kidnapped” him and took him out into the world of full production tours with Judas Priest. “There I was, the stage tech or ‘monitor babysitter’.” This led to touring with Luis Miguel in the U.S. and when that monitor engineer left, he took that chair. This enabled a return to Judas Priest, this time mixing monitors. Next, he spent five years in the hot seat as Aerosmith’s monitor engineer for which he would receive two Parnelli Award nominations. He’s also worked with “the Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman configuration” of Yes; Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band; and more recently, Nine Inch Nails. In 2018, he was on David Byrne’s American Utopia world tour — a complicated monitor gig if there ever was one, but for him it was “a really fun year.”
This is Chadwick’s first outing with Waters, taking that spot at the last minute — as in two hours after the dress rehearsal. “Fortunately, already here was [monitor tech] Jamie Nelson, who I had worked with on David Byrne, so that was tremendously helpful.” Chadwick is also dedicated DiGiCo user and has “been an SD7 user for over 10 years” and today is on the Quantum 7. “The drummer gets a single sub on the stage; the rest of the band is all in-ears,” he says. It’s all Jerry Harvey Audio Roxannes except for Waters, who uses JH Sharonas.
This is his first time engineering in the round, which means among other things those surround speakers are facing the band. All the musicians are singing but the drummer and one of the keyboard players, making for a total of seven vocal mics for the general band. Add Waters and the two background vocalists, who are all constantly in motion, and it becomes a herculean effort to keep extraneous room noise at bay and everything sounding great to the performers.
Then, There’s the Rooms…
“Some arenas have more VIP boxes than others, and that means more glass. Some purposely don’t have acoustic ceilings or treatment because they want [sports] crowd noise as loud as possible when their team plays there, and that’s another adjustment. All these arenas are different and add in being in the round on top of that and well… that’s a lot of reflections and surround sound coming back at those vocal mics on stage.” It means Chadwick is active the whole show. “I keep my fingers on the faders for the background singers and take them out whenever they are not singing and push them back in time for their vocals.”
Chadwick is not bothering with Primary Source Enhancers because he says they only provide around 3 or 4 dB of reduction when “I need in the realm of 8-10 dB, so I’d still end up riding those faders anyway!” One more “bonus” of being in the round? “That means we’re the last to get power and the clock never stops ticking.” The enormous video rig is hung, P.A. speakers are flown, and finally the stage gets rolled in. Then — and only then — monitor world is attended to. “Sound check is actually more of a rehearsal followed by a sound check, as while the set list never changes, songs are regularly tweaked with additional elements. There’s always something to be working on!”
Although a seasoned professional, Chadwick can be moved by the music. “When that first show was underway and the intro to ‘Wish You Were Here’ started, all the hair on my arms and the back of my neck went up. But that’s why you do this, right?”
Ears are the Best Tools
When discussing pulling off the impressive — if not overwhelming — audio feat daily, all point their fingers to Alex Moore, the system tech who manages to get the system working consistently every night, every show.
Moore grew up in Elkhart, IN, and attended Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN, majoring in audio recording and minoring in physics, electro-acoustics. Out of college he went to Nashville and worked for Sound Image, who sent him out with Brad Paisley, Lady A, Kacey Musgraves, Rascal Flatts, and others, mostly as a tech or mixing monitors. When there was a lull in the work in 2017, he reached out to Clair Global. “The first tour I did for them was with Eric Clapton, and I moved onto Zac Brown Band as monitor system engineer, and then was the FOH system engineer after that. Clair gave me the opportunity to grow in this role as I did a lot of amphitheaters, arenas and baseball stadiums.”
This is Moore’s first tour with Waters, and he says, “it’s been a really great opportunity. Clair Global provides the set of tools and the support, and after five months on a tour like this, you find your stride. On a show this big, it’s important to develop a consistent workflow and commit some of that to muscle memory.”
Moore agrees the room itself is the biggest challenge, but there again, the provided tools help with that. “We have incredible consistency, as all the motors are pre-rigged in our clouds,” with the latter being a truss system that acts as a sub grid to fly all those speakers from. “This means no matter where we are playing, all of the speaker arrays have the same distance relationship to each other. That’s a massive advantage, as it allows me to eliminate some of the variables right away.” But not all the variables: The tour started off trimming the bottom of the P.A. to 40’ and then found themselves trimming to 35’. But even then, getting the right amount of energy from the system and creating sight lines around those video screens and lighting rigs requires finesse with a little trial and error. It is always a balancing act, as he says when one adjustment is made somewhere, it affects all the other aspects. “But all the teams work together for the greater good, and nobody does anything that prevents someone else from doing their job.”
This is also Moore’s first time working with surround sound speakers. “Unlike the main system, the location of our surround arrays varies from day to day depending on where there is steel to hang from around the perimeter of the venue. It’s kind of an imperfect science due to the physical distance that they can be from the other [main system] speakers. You can’t introduce electronic delay in the same way you would when time-aligning the main speaker arrays. If you did, some days you could be introducing 50 to 100 msec of delay to the mains to align them back to the surrounds. You must think outside the box in terms of the relative difference versus absolute time. You can’t necessarily use tools like SMAART for this. It becomes more of a psychoacoustics issue and in this case, your ears are the best tools.”
You Get Paid For This?
Stearns started off at the School of Arts in Philadelphia in 2011, taking recording classes. “I didn’t know the live industry, but then I had one class that was about live sound, and that teacher would take the class to different live venues to meet house engineers. We discussed mixing, signal flow, acoustic/room treatment and P.A. coverage,” he says. After learning from audio engineers in the field, he was smitten. Compared to all the endless Pro Tools classes he was taking, live was more inviting and “just because of that one class, I was like, wow, you get paid to do this?” Halfway through college, Stearns found an ad online from Clair Global and next thing he knew he was scurrying up the road to Lititz, PA where he went to work. “Clair’s standard is to bring in a new person into the shop to learn all their proprietary products.” When one of their tours comes through nearby Philly (an 80-minute drive), the new hires get some field experience. After six months, they sent Stearns out on his first tour: Paul McCartney.
In 2017, he was a P.A. rigger for Waters’ Us + Them tour and got familiar with the production camp, and so was named crew chief for this current tour. He too confirms it’s a complicated tour. “I honestly don’t know if any other company could have done this tour,” he says, pointing to rig hanging from the ceiling. “Our Cohesion System uses our proprietary cable, HI-D, that can go the distance connecting our amp racks to the farthest speakers, which is a 330’ cable run. Other P.A. systems would have had to hang additional amp racks in the rig up there to make it work, and believe me, we’re close to maxing out every arena as it is.”
For Stearns, labor is the biggest challenge. Not his people, but the day crew hired for each venue, as that pool still suffers from the industry-wide labor shortage. Echoing a familiar theme for all live event companies these days, he says, “sometimes we’ll walk into a building and the rigging call is for 20 people, and there are five of them teaching the other 15 what to do.” A careful eye and lots of questions and support makes sure it’s all done safely; but still it’s a persistent problem: “There are local crew members who are so overworked they had just slept in their car from the gig the night before, and when we come in, it could be their eighth show in a row.” He adds his crew always picks up the slack. “We all step up to do whatever needs to be done regardless of job title,” he says, adding with a laugh: “We could not make it out alive if we didn’t!”
About that crew: “We have an awesome diverse crew with varying levels of experience, and some of which are on their first tour. We all look after each other.”
The tour is taking a short break and then the crew is off to Europe in 2023.
Roger Waters 2022 ‘This is Not a Drill’ Tour
Crew
- FOH Engineer: Jon Lemon
- Audio Crew Chief: Jeff Stearns
- Monitor Engineer: John Chadwick
- Systems Engineer: Alex Moore
- Monitor Tech: Jamie Nelson
- Stage Tech: Alexi Wright
- Audio/Comms: Ken Fiedler
- Audio Techs: Katrina Rice, John Meusel
- Audio Surround Techs: Zoe Johnson, Wayne “Chan” Teaster
Gear
P.A. Gear:
- Main Flown System: (8) 16-deep hangs of Clair Cohesion 12 (128 total)
- Flown Subs: (4) 3-deep hangs of CP-218 Subs (12 total)
- Ground Subs: (8) groups of 3 CP-218 Subs in cardioid (24 total)
- Surrounds: (8) 10-deep hangs of Cohesion 10 (80 total)
- Front Fills: (18) Clair CP-6
FOH Gear:
- FOH Console: DiGiCo Quantum 5
- P.A. Drive: (6) Lake LM44 to mains; (8) LM26 to subs and fills
- Surround Wireless: (5) Wisycom MTK952 transmitters, (8) MRK960 receivers
- Amps: Lab.gruppen PLM20k44
Outboard Gear:
- (2) Tubetech CL 2A; (2) Midas XL42; (2) Maag EQ4, Maag Magnum K Channel; Alan Smart C2 compressor; SSL Fusion, The Bus+; (2) Bricasti M7; and 64 channels of UAD inserts via UAD2 live racks
MON Gear:
- Monitor Console: DiGiCo Quantum SD7
- IEM Hardware: Wisycom MTK952, MPR50
- IEMs: Jerry Harvey Audio Sharona, Roxannes
- Wireless: Shure Axient D (32 channels)
- Mics: Vocals — Sennheiser 435, Shure SM58, KSM11; Drums — Earthworks DP30/C, Royer SF-24, AEA N22, Beyer 201, DPA 4055, Lauten LS-208; Water’s guitar — Neumann TLM103; Sax — Shure Beta 98 HC RF; Keyboards — DPA 4099; AKG C414; Neumann KMS 104
- DI Boxes: Radial Engineering SW8, J48
- Intercoms: Riedel Bolero (wireless)
