A Chat with the Foo Fighters’ Monitor and RF crew
Josh Freese and Pat Smear.
Unquestionably the biggest band in modern rock, working with the Foo Fighters is a huge gig for engineers and technicians. This is especially true working for frontman (and founding Nirvana drummer) Dave Grohl, who himself is known for his audio savvy and gear knowledge. However, all of this pressure presents no fears to monitor engineer Ian Beveridge and RF technician Eiran Simpson, who keep the band’s ears happy with systems built around Lectrosonics M2 Duet system, specifically M2T dual stereo transmitters, M2Ra beltpack receivers and an M2C active antenna combiner.
What was your worst technical nightmare mixing a show and how did you get through it?
Ian Beveridge: The Foo Fighters were playing Manchester Cricket Grounds, which is a huge venue, well over 50,000 capacity. We were headlining, the previous band finished, and we were doing set change. It was typical British weather, lots of rain, and all this water had pooled in the roof above the left wing of the stage. The roof collapsed, and maybe 50 gallons of water hit the monitor console, which was a Yamaha PM5D at the time. The resulting digital noise was the loudest, most obnoxious thing I’ve ever heard — so bad that everyone’s fight-or-flight reflex kicked in. This was 10 minutes before the band was supposed to go on.
How did you recover?
IB: Dave Poynter, the monitor tech, was aware that the previous band had the same console, God love him. We borrowed their console, wired it up channel for channel, loaded a file into it, and the band went onstage.
How is the Lectrosonics M2-series monitor system deployed with the Foo Fighters?
IB: Every band member has a tech, and every tech has a mix, fed from stereo subgroups on the monitor console. I send every tech a duplicate of their band member’s mix, which is Y-split from the same stereo pair but into a separate transmitter-receiver chain. If the artist has any trouble, the tech can just hand over their beltpack. Plus, it’s just plain good that techs are hearing exactly what the artists hear. A lot of techs want to hear just their artist’s voice or instrument, just the guitar, whatever, then a tiny bit of the rest of the band. But if you’re hearing what the artist is hearing, it’s much easier to ascertain, for example, if someone has gone out of tune — and who that is.
Are the M2T transmitters fed with AES, Dante or analog audio from the console?
IB: I run analog. Just my preference, really! It’s a loud band, and part of my challenge is to make it as quiet and non-fatiguing as possible. Plus, the band plays two-to-three-hour shows. I like the immediacy analog gives me over controlling levels.
Of course, the M2T and M2R are fully digital at the wireless level, in terms of transmission and reception. And that can create a learning curve. For example, with an analog system, if you wander out of range, you’ll begin to hear little wisps and static that lets you know. They’ll get louder as your signal integrity breaks up. With the M2 system, there’s a lowpass filter that cuts in to save the artist’s ears. So, it’ll work perfectly unless there’s a real RF problem, at which point the listener’s pack will just go silent.
What are your needs for range onstage? How do you address them and how does the system perform?
IB: Right now, we just need one M2C combiner and one antenna to cover the band. I find that if we have clean channels, we only need to run the M2Ts at 10 milliwatts. I prefer this because outputting at higher power levels can raise the noise floor no matter what wireless gear you’re using.
Eiran Simpson: You do need to pay attention to antenna placement, both to get a good line-of-sight with the band and to minimize reflections from things like the giant video wall, which can cause problems. The antenna goes about three meters in the air. That said, we have experimented with higher power output and gotten surprisingly good results. The only thing we haven’t done yet is a B-stage thrust that goes from the main stage out into the center of the audience in a giant stadium.
In RF-saturated environments like the large stadiums the Foo Fighters play, how is the system’s performance, in terms of finding and holding onto clean frequencies?
IB: Good question, as range is especially dependent on the cleanliness of the carrier frequency in a digital system. We did a pre-production show at the [22,500-capacity] Shoreline Amphitheatre in California. The stage ran on 10 milliwatts, and Eiran could walk to the very back fence of the venue, and the system still worked perfectly.
ES: Also, on a digital system, the actual carrier is wider. If you look at it on a scanner, there’s not a distinct peak at the middle of the frequency band. It’s about 200 kHz wide, and Lectrosonics recommends at least 400 kHz of spacing between channels. But we’ve had a couple of nightmare gigs where there’s digital TV signal everywhere — Sao Paulo, Brazil is maybe the worst — and I’ve managed to get them working with as little as 325 kHz between them. I should also mention that, because they’re wideband, the transmitters and receivers are especially suited to high-RF environments and extensive touring, because they cover the full legal range of possible frequencies around the world.
IB: Agreed. Banded wireless is definitely going away soon.
Lectrosonics is well known in film and TV production but less so in music. What is your opinion of its audio fidelity for live concerts?
IB: The Lectros sound better than anything else, and I’m not just talking about frequency response. The big thing about mixing a band with three distorted guitars is, you need to position them spatially. If I pan two in the middle of any mix, unless they’re tonally completely different, it’s going to sound like one big guitar. The M2 system provides a wider stereo picture to work within than any other wireless I’ve ever used. Unlike other IEMs, there’s also no residual sound in the opposite earpiece when you’ve panned something hard to one side or the other. It also means that when you add a bit of reverb or Harmonizer to a vocal, it sounds big. That’s a godsend for a mixing engineer.
ES: The Foo Fighters do at least a two-hour show every night, and when you wear in-ears for that long, after taking them out you usually need some time to re-adjust to natural sounds. But with the Lectro packs, there’s just no fatigue like that. You can take them out and immediately have a conversation. There’s just no sonic aggression there. I agree with Ian about the stereo imaging. We have a busy in-ear mix, so it’s nice to have such a big box to work within.
Have any of the band members commented about the system?
ES: The response from the band has been fantastic so far. Guitarist Chris Shiflett specifically commented that they sounded amazing during production rehearsals — to the point of saying he would never go back to what we were using before.
What is the most important non-technical skill to perform a job like yours?
IB: Dealing with people, 100 percent. Are you self-aware enough to live on a bus with eight other people? Also, learning to deal with the artists. I think one of the biggest mistakes rookie engineers and techs make is getting up in their faces too much. You have to figure out, does this person know what they want? Should you take it literally when they say something? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, depending on the artist. A lot of young engineers will look for that literal confirmation because they haven’t developed the confidence yet — but sometimes that means you’re getting up in someone’s grill too much instead of putting your mind to the problem.
Any parting thoughts?
IB: Lectrosonics is a small company, they’re a fun company, and unlike some bigger brand names, wireless is all they do. That must be what makes them the most responsive vendor we’ve ever worked with.
ES: Absolutely. When we were learning the M2 system, trying to optimize band spacing and antenna placement and everything I spoke about, Karl [Winkler] and Colin [Bernard] were phenomenal supporters and educators.
