On his current 3.0 tour, Sting plays a magnificent set of material spanning his wide solo career along with fan favorites from The Police days. Always one to keep his music moving progressively and artistically, his touring performances have been expansive as well. He’s performed solo tours and he has been backed by an orchestra. He’s also co-headlined Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and Shaggy, and he’s had saxophonist Branford Marsalis in his touring band. Adding to his schedule, Sting is also appearing on several stadium dates along the way with friend Billy Joel for a busy year. With the 3.0 tour, it’s back to a tight three-piece band. With him is an incredible guitarist — Dominic Miller, who’s played with Sting over a 33-year period, along with a great new drummer, Chris Maas. There is an incredible joy seen both by members of the band on stage and from the audience — it’s a show not to be missed.
The FOH View
Longtime Sting FOH audio engineer Howard Page originally came on board to do the Symphonicity tour in support of his Symphonicities album, which was released in 2010. That tour paired an orchestra with a small group accompanying Sting. Page had done a lot of orchestral shows previously. Their working relationship became a great fit over all these years. Page is using the Yamaha Rivage PM5 for the 3.0 tour. “With how Sting tours, which is pretty intensive and involves some very difficult venues to get in and out of with the FOH area, I’m using the most practical version of the Yamaha Rivage console. Like any digital console once you get the muscle memory of where everything is and how to get to the various places you very soon realize the Yamaha has a wonderful human interface. There’s almost nothing you can’t do.”
Page says with so many years of development, first with Yamaha’s analog consoles and now their digital consoles, they’ve gotten everything right, especially the sound. “The other big factor when you’re touring hard as we do with Sting is the absolute reliability. This console works everyday, every time; and that to me is the greatest asset you can have.” Page has been under various NDA’s with Yamaha over the years and given them feedback whenever he found a way to make the firmware better. “In the beginning, when I was involved in the design of the Studer Vista 5 console, I took a lot of the ideas that I had on my big show console way back in the Showco days, making it better to integrate between FOH and monitors. I took a lot of ideas from those early days and incorporated them, first in the Studer and now with the Yamaha, so it has some very good shortcuts of doing things that are incorporated in the latest generation of the firmware.”
Self-described as “old school,” Page believes plug-ins are overused in a lot of circumstances and can become a distraction to the focus of the music. “I’ve been at festivals watching other bands, where a guitar solo happens and we never heard it, because at the time the engineer was fiddling with the 17th plug-in on something else.”
And on that “old school” topic, Page added the following caveat. “One thing I preach being old school: Does Harry seating in seat G14 care how many plug-ins are on the lead vocal? No! Plug-ins have a place, and I believe in a recording studio where you’re creating the original material and you can actually hear precisely what they’re doing… but in a live situation, in a lot of the bizarre venues, where we all end up in with huge reflections and reverb times, plug-ins are more of a distraction. Who are they really satisfying? Really, it’s only the person mixing, because they know all about them, and they’re not satisfying the audience overall unless you happen to be a tech head or another mixer. I see so many downsides to overusing plug-ins, and I’m more that happy with the plug-ins that come with the Yamaha console. I only use the reverbs, some of the compression, but I only use what’s in the board. My FOH area is cleaner and tighter as a consequence.”
Acoustical Challenges
“There are some things I do try and emulate on some of Sting’s tracks, as he has ADT (Automatic Double Tracking) on the vocal,” Page notes. “ADT is very, very difficult to absolutely reproduce in a live reverberant environment. You can dig a real hole for yourself trying to use ADT. The thing you need to be careful about when you’re mixing a live show is giving the audience focus. In the case of this show, it’s Sting and his words and have been for decades. So the focus of my mix is not the kick drum, not the low-end; it’s Sting the vocal, as clean and pure as possible to cut through the sometimes extremely difficult environments that we play in.”
One such experience Page encountered was when they played a huge stadium in Warsaw, Poland. The venue had a reverberant delay of 42 seconds, and here’s how he dealt with it. “I kept the vocal as the focus again, and not so much the band. When an audience buys a ticket to a show, they have an image in their mind of what that artist sounds like. That’s why they want to go to the show. So as a live engineer, if you can give that audience a more exciting live sound — but a very close representation of what that artist really sounds like — you’ve done your job. When someone from the audience comes up after the show and says ‘Oh that’s the greatest sound I ever heard in this venue, and I come to shows here all the time…’ that’s not my ego trip, all I’ve done is given that audience exactly what they expect to hear in their mind when they bought a ticket for that show,” Page explains.
“I have an attitude from the many years of experience that in 2024, there are no real bad line array P.A’s. We’re not carrying a P.A. on this tour, but using house P.A.’s. We know enough about the technology, the design now. Especially in Europe, when I don’t take my own Clair system, I’ve used practically every name brand of line array P.A. There are no bad line arrays, but there are plenty of bad engineers driving them.”
The Listening Proof
“When I’ve been at FOH at a festival listening to a lineup of bands and the first band sounds okay, the second sounds average, the third sounds fantastic and the fourth is horrendous… the P.A. did not change between those bands, but the engineer did. It’s how they are mixing and driving it — it’s not the P.A. It amazes me how so many guys walk up to a festival sound system and don’t pick up a mic and just hear how that sound system is tuned and balanced. I’ve walked into systems where the sub-bass is turned up 24 dB over the array balance, which is outrageous. Before you’ve even started mixing, you’re beaten.”
Page added that one of the pitfalls of many acts is no one from management or the actual band is listening from the FOH. “If they ever did, they might be absolutely horrified what the audience is actually hearing — the overuse of low-end, making the kick drum the lead instrument… things like that.”
Coming from analog days and the third-octave graphic equalizer days, Page says he used to look at the graphic equalizer and all the knobs and say ‘Oh, geez that seems like a lot.’ “Sadly, nowadays we’re all on computer screens with the equalization and we tend to look at the screen and judge whether that’s too much or not enough EQ. Believe me, as I did years ago with the third-octave graphic equalizers, I would measure the frequency response after tuning a show and be horrified at what they looked like on a screen, but that’s the way my ears told me that it needed to be done to get the sound to be clean and clear. To this day, I show people the screen I have to do on some of their P.A.s and they’re shocked. But then they hear my show with infinite clarity and they say ‘Oh, okay, I guess that’s what you have to do.’”
Page’s mix philosophy is straightforward: “I have a system where I tune for very linear transfer. I’m setting the system such that exactly what’s coming out of the mixing console is coming out of that sound system. So any big low-end or clarity and definition I need all comes from the creative mix element on the console. This 3.0 tour is great, in that it’s like a reincarnation of the whole Sting concept. The band is so tight, yet has this flexibility and freedom on stage with such dynamics — it’s just been brilliant.”
Monitor World
Monitor engineer Xavier Gendron has been mixing on the Yamaha Rivage PM7 since 2019, noting how much he was blown away by the sound of the console once he was introduced to it. He just recently switched to the PM10 with the new engine and is even more impressed with the sound he gets from it. “For the Sting tour, I’m just using internal reverbs — Rupert Neve EQ, the Bricasti plug-in and the X-verb — but no outboard effects. Our backline crew, which includes Daniel Quatrochi, Richard Mazzetta and Robert Davenport, are doing a fantastic job on making the instruments sound great and — more importantly — consistent, every single day, and so not much on my end is needed.”
“Since we did the first Las Vegas residency, Sting asked us to use a headset mic for him so he could roam the stage with ease, and I suggested to Howard [Page] the Sennheiser HSP4, and it’s worked out great,” Gendron adds. “Sting’s IEMs are Future Sonics MG6HX with Shure PSM1000 transmitters. Dominic Miller’s guitar amp microphone is an Austrian Audio OC18 and Mesa DI, and the drum mics for Chris Maas’ kit include the Shure 91 and SM57, Telefunken M82, and Audio-Technica ATM 350 and AT 5045.”
Both Sting and guitarist Dominic Miller use Clair CM14 wedges. “For a while, Sting was just wearing one in-ear along with the wedges. On this tour he’s using both IEMs but occasionally takes one out, and so we have wedges for him as well. In my opinion, these are the best wedges I’ve ever used. They were designed by the amazing Clair engineering team with an immense input from one of my mentors Dave Skaff, who left us too soon.” [Skaff, of U2, Barbra Streisand and Led Zeppelin fame, passed away in 2022 —ed.]
“I am so blessed to be working with Sting, his band, the audio crew and all the Clair Global guys at the shop, which I’ve been with since 1993,” says Gendron. He adds that this tour is very straightforward — very old school. “To be honest, I don’t have to do much with these guys, mix-wise, as the band are so tight, so professional… and I don’t believe in snapshots. The band is just amazing… they control their dynamic.”
The North American leg of Sting 3.0 wraps up on Jan. 26, 2025 at the Hard Rock Live Sacramento (CA), with the South American tour kicking off on Feb 14, 2025 at the Farmasi Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Production Crew
- Sound Company: Clair Global, using venue-supplied systems
- FOH Engineer: Howard Page
- Monitor Engineer: Xavier Gendron
- Tour Manager: Martin Kierszenbaum
- Production Manager: Seth Goldstein
- Production Coordinator: Lindsey McGoran
- Stage Manager: Chris Deters
- Audio Techs: Manus Muller, Peter Behr
- Pro Tools Playback Engineer: Tony Lake Ugval
- Backline Techs: Danny Quatrochi (Sting bass tech), Richard Mazzetta, Robert Davenport
Gear
FOH
- FOH Console: Yamaha Rivage PM5
- Outboard: None (using all in-console reverbs and compression)
MON
- Monitor Console: Yamaha Rivage PM10
- Outboard: None (in-console reverbs — Bricasti & Rev-X), compression, Rupert Neve EQ
- IEMs: Future Sonics MG6HX, Shure PSM1000 transmitters
- Sting Vocal Mic: Sennheiser HSP4 headset
- Drum Mics: Shure 91, SM57; Telefunken M82; Audio-Technica ATM 350, AT 5045
- Guitar Mics: Austrian Audio OC18; Mesa DI
