On Aug. 3, 2014, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers kicked off its Hypnotic Eye tour in support of the group’s new studio album of the same title. The tour was a mix of mostly arena dates, with a few festival appearances, along with a number of outdoor performances, including legendary venues such as the scenic Red Rocks and The Gorge amphitheaters and Boston’s Fenway Park. The two-and-a-half-month tour concluded with two dates at the revamped (and reborn) L.A. Forum in mid-October.
From a sound reinforcement viewpoint, this could have been just another typical rock tour, yet for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and opening act Steve Winwood, this particular outing was far from the usual. It also proved a little outside the norm for soundco Sound Image and FOH mixer Robert Scovill, as this was the first major tour outing for EAW’s new Anya Adaptive Performance line array. Although Anya had been through a number of earlier outings on a beta basis, including the Coachella Festival, this high-profile tour using totally new technology was definitely a high-stakes leap of faith.
“We analyze, watch and develop evolving technology closely and we strive to remain at the technological forefront in the touring industry,” said Sound Image president Dave Shadoan. “When Robert Scovill came to us with the concept of using Anya for Tom Petty, we knew that it was time to pay attention as we had been monitoring the Anya system as well. It will also be a great opportunity for Sound Image to show the system to other engineers that are curious about Adaptive Performance technology, allowing them to see how it can be used with their clients moving forward. It is an exciting project to say the least.”
Eventually, Sound Image made the Anya investment and after rehearsals in Los Angeles, a 54-box system went on the road. “Making that kind of change is like working without a net,” says industry veteran Scovill, who this year celebrated his 20th year of working with Tom Petty. “I was very firm about wanting to use that Anya P.A. system, and I put my reputation on the line with it. I had done some offline mixing with it earlier in the year, and wanted to get it out into some arenas and find out if it was as real as I thought it was. Dave Shadoan at Sound Image also put his butt on the line — it was a big purchase and I had asked him to make a sizeable K1 purchase three years ago, so my credibility with him was at stake, as well.”
Look Ma, No Subs!
When Scovill first started testing the system in March, playing back and mixing Pro Tools files, he had somewhat of a revelation. “There was so much available energy and headroom in the P.A., that I thought I could do an entire tour with Anya without using subs.”
While unconventional in live sound, the no-sub concept harkens to Scovill’s studio mixing experiences. “When I’m in the studio, and need a bigger low frequency footprint in my mix, I don’t have subwoofers available in the studio monitors,” he explains. “This beautiful LF energy we’ve created is all available at the input stage and not by the subwoofers, so to have a P.A. deliver that in the same mindset as studio monitors was very refreshing. With Anya, we still have that ‘hay-stacked’ bottom end — we like that and it’s cool, but for me with difference with Anya was it wasn’t coming from two sources.” This, he says, avoided any inherent time-arrival issues between the LF and top system.
“I think the whole live sound industry as a whole has flip-flopped the idea of bottom-end and low-end,” Scovill adds. “I was always taught that when you get the low-end sorted out, that everything else will fall into place. Sometimes when I watch someone mixing who wants to add more weight to the bass guitar or drums, the first thing they seem to reach for is the subwoofers, even though the weight of those sources typically comes an octave above that.” Scovill did emphasize that “this is Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers — it’s not Beyonce — and we could get away with it here.”
Always eager to share his insights and experiences, Scovill ran a series of seminar-style events (co-sponsored by Avid and EAW) during the tour where 30 or 40 people a day came out to the venue to discuss room tuning for that particular venue, with a geometry assessment of the room and running a virtual sound check. “These little program events drew almost 1,000 people during the course of the tour, going through the entire process of the day and showcasing some of the technologies we were using. It was very informative and a lot of people got some insights that they otherwise would not have. But I would say that all the audio pros who came by to visit were blown away by the fact we weren’t using subwoofers.”
Back to the Mix
Compared to the hubbub about the Anya system, the FOH mix side was more conventional. To no surprise, Scovill — since 2005/2006, a long-time Avid VENUE evangelist — was mixing on a VENUE D-Show. “It’s fully loaded model with 128 channels, 96 preamps and full DSP.
Averaged out over the two hours, he keeps the SPL in the 101 or 102 dB A-weighted range, which works in with the overall approach. “One hallmark of a Tom Petty show is being able to make it very dynamic,” Scovill adds. “Some parts are very soft, some are louder and he has the tendency to mix that up — and pace his shows— really well. That makes for a nice show.”
Another new change was switching over to all-MADI distribution of the mic/stage signals for this tour. “We’d do the MADI conversion at the stage with a dedicated VENUE FOH rack and then send that out to RME MADI routers, which distributed fiber out to front of house and we’d re-distribute it to my FOH rack and to the two Pro Tools recording systems we had out there. Same thing happened at the monitors, where he [monitor engineer Greg Looper] got the coax feeds from the central RME and re-distributed that to his Pro Tools rigs and VENUE monitor system. We also created a third set of fiber and BNC’s outputs that were available to production trucks, TV trucks, festival feeds, etc. In that 128-channel MADI stream, we had all the mic pre’s, all my stereo subgroups, wet and dry 2-track mixes so people could make any combination of that at a festival or TV show. It worked out really well.”
All of Scovill’s mix signal processing was in the box, an approach he’s been doing since 2005. Among the must-haves in his virtual rack are “the Pultecs, which — dare I say — I use religiously and Crane Song Phoenix saturation emulator. Those are my two mainstays, although I really like the SoftTube plug-ins, particularly the FET compressor and their Trident A-Range emulation, along with McDSP’s Bus Limiter, which is fantastic.
The Money Channel
Plug-ins on Petty’s vocal chain include two Brainworx BX Dynamic EQ’s, the Crane Song Phoenix, Softube’s A-Range emulation and VENUE’s onboard compression.
Mic-wise, Petty has been singing into a Telefunken M-80 for about three tours and according to Scovill, “we’ve had great success with that mic.” The band is kind of an anti-wireless bunch — the only time they use anything wireless is on guitars for a couple songs where they want to get out and be mobile. And on this tour, he [Tom Petty] was very engaging with the crowd, telling cool stories and such, which was very refreshing.”
On Petty’s guitar rig, Scovill selected “a couple SE Electronics Instrument Reflexion Filter 2 acoustic barriers around the SM57’s on his amps,” he recalls. “It’s really a survival technique, because I never know which amp he’s going to use. These really keep the cymbals and drum bleed out of the mics, where I have to leave both mics open at all times.”
On the other electric guitars, “we’re using SM57’s on the amp cabinets, with an additional mic on one cabinet that [lead guitarist] Mike Campbell turned me on to, called an Ear Trumpet [Edwina model], which I’ve since become a real fan of. I put it on his Deluxe Reverb and — especially on 12-string electric guitar, it really handled the guitar’s harmonics nicely. I was surprised at how this condenser mic sounded on guitar — very sweet, while for straight clean and distorted guitar sounds, I’ll go with the SM57.”
The Drum miking complement is pretty conventional — Shure 52 and 91a on kick; SM57 on snare top; Neumann KM 184 on snare bottom; Sennheiser e04’s on toms; Shure KSM 137 on hi-hat; and Earthworks DP30’s on cowbells.
“One thing I do that’s odd is to use a combination of an X/Y pair [Rode NT4’s] and a pair of [AKG] C414’s over the kit,” says Scovill. “These are all time-aligned in terms of their arrival from the snare. I set this using a snare drum with a powered speaker built into it in place of the normal snare. I run some noise bursts through it and run one of the 414’s and store a reference trace of it using SMAART software and then plug the other mics one at a time into SMAART and physically manipulate them until their phase traces lie atop each another. This way, I can get a stereo kit sound from the 414’s and it will still collapse back to mono with no comb filtering on the snare, while keeping the snare image centered in any of the mics — with regard to the stereo image. I lightly expand (4 to 5 dB of depth) the X/Y pair and trigger it from the snare’s top mic. It works really well and you can get a really good kit sound from just those three microphones.”
According to Scovill, “Petty is keenly sensitive to bass guitar being too loud on stage. The challenge comes from the times when I need overdriven bass, especially in the top-end of the midrange. I handle this with some combinations of SansAmp and Sound Toys’ Decapitator plug-in. I loved the bass guitar sounds were we’re getting on this tour.”
Onstage at the Forum
Also new was a two-night appearance as the renovated/redesigned L.A. Forum, which concluded the tour. “It’s like a big nightclub now. Above 120 Hz, the place is fantastic — almost too dead, to my ears. Given the choice of too deadened or too live, I’ll take the too-dead option. But on the floor — yet not the upper seating — the under-120 Hz is wildly out of control, and can make for a tough mix, and that was with no subs — I can hardly imaging going in there with a lot of subs. Yet it’s wonderful in the vocal and guitar range and it’s nice not having to battle having a huge scoreboard hanging down in the center of the venue. But still, I would put its sound quality at above 85% of the rooms on the planet — the work they did was well served and it’s going to be a premiere concert venue.”
And in the End…
So how did Anya system perform? Fortunately, this is a story with a happy ending. “As it turns out, the difference with Anya was pretty startling. It was a definite wake-up call where you push up the master fader and say ‘hey, wait a minute — this is something special’, Scovill explains. “Obviously, it has to sound good, but also represents a refined way of overcoming the obstacles of all P.A. systems, which is ensuring coverage of the geometry you’re trying to fill. These days, there cannot be any cheap seats in terms of the audio. The public expectation is way too high and we achieved exceptional coverage into the farthest reaches of the room, not just in terms of frequency response, but the evenness of SPL coverage into the room. The end result was startling — really. And to have it sound great was the added bonus.”
Dealing with Red Rocks
“There were two or three gigs on the calendar where we thought we’d live or die by what the Anya system could do: Washington’s The Gorge, Red Rocks (Morrison, CO) and Boston’s Fenway Park,” recalls Robert Scovill, FOH engineer for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Hypnotic Eye tour. “Fenway put a startle into us, because we knew we wouldn’t have any more P.A. system available — we would have to do that with an arena-sized P.A., and that worked out and sounded fantastic in the end.”
Scovill does feel there are some misunderstandings about the challenge at Red Rocks. “It’s not necessarily the steepness of it — because it’s not really that steep — but you end up with a significant part of the audience very close to the P.A. while a significant part of the audience is far from the P.A. So the real challenge is SPL distribution — and not necessarily coverage — and that capability is what Anya is all about.”
Another point stems from the fact that Red Rock’s “mix position is about 60 feet from the downstage edge and essentially up in the air, so you’re very close to the P.A. system as is the bottom third of the audience. Traditionally, you’ve had to mix fairly loud at that mix position — to the point of it being uncomfortable at times — to get enough energy up the hill. And that’s the way it goes with mechanically articulated line source and horizontal array P.A.’s. That’s not the case with Anya, which can start at the back and then subsequentially level things out throughout the rest of the venue.”
Anya also provided a sense of comfort while mixing FOH. “I was able to lose the mentality of ‘I have to make it sound like this here, so it will sound OK over there’ or ‘make it bright here to get enough midrange up in the seats’. The polars and measurements verified that on a day-to-day basis, even with a magnitude trace taken in the upper top seats showed we were only ±1 or 2 dB from the mix position.”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Hypnotic Eye Tour
Sound Company: Sound Image
Audio Crew
FOH Engineer: Robert Scovill
Systems Engineer: Andrew Dowling
Monitor Engineer: Greg Looper
Monitor Techs: Chuck Smith
Audio Crew Chief: Marcus Douglas
PA Tech: Chris Houston
P.A. System
Mains: (54) EAW Anya Line Arrays
Subs: None
Ground Fill: (10) L-Acoustic KARA’s; (10) DV-DOSC Subs.
Signal Distribution: VENUE FOH Rack; (2) VENUE Stage Racks — 96 inputs (32 analog in/32 analog out); RME MADI Router; Apogee Big Ben.
FOH Gear
FOH Console: Avid VENUE D-Show, 32 faders
Plug-ins: Crane Song Phoenix; SoftTube FET Compressor and Trident A-Range emulation; McDSP’s Bus Limiter; Brainworx BX Dynamic EQ; Sound Toys’ Decapitator; Avid factory plug-ins and VENUEPack 4.
MADI: RME MADI Router
Monitor Gear
Monitor Console: Avid VENUE D-show 32 faders
Outboard: Rupert Neve Portico II Channel
Mics: Telefunken M80 (vocals); Shure SM57’s (guitar amps); Ear Trumpet Edwina (amp); Shure 52, 91a (kick); Neumann KM 184 (overheads, snare bottom); Shure SM57 (snare top); Sennheiser e04 (toms); AKG C414 (overheads); Shure KSM 137 (hi-hat); Earthworks DP30 (cowbell).
IEM’s: Shure PSM900
All photos by Steve Jennings unless otherwise indicated.
