FOH Interview

Jeffrey Holdip and crew keep Canadian songstress Nelly Furtado sounding great no matter where she is.

I recently caught up with FOH mixer Jeffrey Holdip and the rest of the Towers Clair Showco audio crew for Nelly Furtado. Adamson’s Ben Cabot helped out for the first two shows of the Canadian leg of Nelly’s world tour by tuning the house system. He uses sine-wave sweeps with a multichannel version WinMLS by Lars Morset to equalize the Clair IO processors. He chose WinMLS because it’s the only portable multichannel measurement system quick enough to handle the time pressures of touring. Ben’s kit of six microphones, multichannel sound card and computer can easily fit into a laptop bag and be hand-carried onto an airplane. This was the first time I have seen WinMLS used on a major tour. I have used almost every measurement system on the market; I think that tuning the house before the artist sound check with WinMLS and using Smaart when the band plays is ideal for getting the most useful measurements. Most speaker manufacturers use sine-wave sweeps because they’re accurate even when there are extraneous noises. With a sine-wave sweep you can get usable measurements even if there is hammering and banging going on. 

Seger’s Crew Details How They Handle Working with an Old-School Rock ‘n’ Roll Legend.

Last November, Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band launched their first concert tour in 10 years at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Mich. They kept on trucking right on through spring, when FOH caught up with crewmembers Brad Divens (FOH), Peter Thompson (monitors) and Paul Jump (systems engineer/crew chief). The three talked to us about their equipment, their experiences, and what it takes to produce a tour of this magnitude.

Tony Blanc and Bill Chrysler Get It Up In Record Time for Christina Aguilera.

OK, I admit it. I wanted to talk with the Christina Aguilera tour guys because she totally blew me away with her performances on the last two Grammy telecasts. Her duet with Herbie Hancock last year and the tribute to James Brown with “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” proved that the budding diva has not only pipes, but taste and chops to match. 

There is something to be said for the idea of family. When the band Sister Hazel and their management, Sixthman decided to have a convention for the band and do it on a cruise ship, they called on the services of a company and crew they had used before, Atlanta Sound and Lights and head crew dude Sean Henry. Now, six years later, that little convention idea has grown into the Rock Boat — more than 20 bands, 2000+ fans and one big boat. Oh, and 11 sound guys. You read that right. Eleven guys to cover six stages and shows that start by noon and go until very late every night, with acts ranging from unknown songwriters (Honor by August won a BMI competition for their slot) to budding rock stars (Atlanta's Five Star Iris and Austin's Wideawake stood out) to established acts including Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, Cowboy Mouth and "hosts" Sister Hazel.

It's one man versus 10,000 fists and one of the most rambunctious rock bands that hit stages last summer — Disturbed — yet FOH mixer Scott Canady doesn't look worried. It might be because he spent a number of years with the quartet — singer David Draiman, guitarist Dan Donegan, drummer Mike Wengren and bassist Fuzz — working as their monitor engineer, taking them from wedges to personal monitors, or it might just be that he knows what he's doing.

When The Rolling Stones' "A Bigger Bang" tour came to Chicago recently, we had the opportunity to visit backstage with monitor engineer Mike Adams. It was a cold and windy October evening when Jack Kontney caught up with Adams before the show.

FOH: How did you get started as an engineer?

Mike Adams: I count my career from when I started getting paid on a weekly basis. That was 1981. It was a band called Green Dog, out of Denver, Colorado. As far as getting started, I took the long, stupid, hard road. When I was 16, I just started hanging around, getting myself into nightclubs and finding guys that made it sound really good, and just started trading out my labor for their knowledge. By the time I was 18, I was working all over the Denver area, mixing in clubs. And now here I am.

Chris Raboid and Brad Blettenberg are a good team. Covering FOH and MON plus production for Southern rock jam band Widespread Panic, they have become "part of the family" with a band known for going through sound guys with almost Prince-like regularity — Chris has helmed FOH for five years, and Brad has been camped out at the side of the stage for a decade. FOH caught up with the daring duo on the band's Halloween show in Las Vegas (you can't tell, but the singer is wearing a chicken suit in the pics) and got a glimpse of a crew that has both the chops and the balls to hang with a band that regularly takes things to the edge of the musical abyss without ever falling over. And this band that has never had a radio hit was touring with one of the most cutting-edge and best-sounding systems we have heard in a long time. Here's how they do it.

For those of you who do not recognize the name Howard Page, you should. His audio credits include Van Halen and Sade, as well as the design and creation of six sound consoles, including the Showco Showconsole, one of the first digital mixing desks (OK, digitally-controlled analog). In addition, Page currently serves as director of engineering for Showco, part of Clair Brothers Audio. In a career measured not in years but in decades, Page has mastered the art of the live mix, so there is little wonder why many in his native Australia refer to him as "The Legend."

Dave Rat is sipping on a red wine while absent-mindedly holding a cigarette more like a prop than an outright addiction. He's wearing a rumpled pair of shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack that are tailored more with Benny Hill in mind than the Tour de France. All in all, it could be a relaxing evening almost anywhere. That is, except for the fact that at the moment he happens to be in the center of an FOH and lighting fort in the middle of the Earl's Court venue in London, surrounded by 10,000 screaming fans halfway through a set by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on the first and ostensibly most nerve-wracking night of a four-show stand. He turns to a visitor and winks, saying in a voice practiced at cutting through the crowd noise without seeming to strain, "I try very had to find ways not to have to really exert myself at a show."

For anyone who thinks a church sound department means a Mackie mixer with two knobs missing, four pockmarked SM58s, two Samson wireless mics and a 17- year-old volunteer, Lakewood Church in Houston may be something of a revelation.

Supporting the theory that everything's bigger in Texas, Lakewood is a 16,000 seat arena-sized facility whose list of gear, musicians and crew reads like an attempt at a Guinness Book entry: 11 piece band, 200- voice choir, four Nuendo rigs recording 135 tracks of audio, four Euphonix consoles and five full-time sound crew professionals, all under the supervision of one Reed Hall, director of audio and technical production.

Over the course of a 20-year career, John C. Clark III has gone from stagehand work in clubs in his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M. to running FOH for R&B phenom Kanye West. Today he finds himself on the backend of West's "Touch the Sky" tour–a massive undertaking that started out as a coheadline thing with U2 where Clark was driving a huge Meyer-powered rig that included four M3D line array loudspeaker s, eight MILO cabinets, four MICA units, and nine 700- HP subwoofers per side–doing one-off fly dates with the system du jour and making his boss sound great on whatever gear he is given.

Balance is a tough thing. At FOH we are constantly being bombarded with requests/ideas/suggestions for sound guys to interview. Lots of good guys out there and who gets in is as much an issue of timing as anything else. But sometimes we will have to choose between a couple of interesting candidates. Like this month. On the one hand, we've got a young guy by the name of Kyle Chirnside who has gone with Fall Out Boy from clubs to arenas in a year. On the other, Brian Ruggles–who has been at the desk with Billy Joel for 35 years and who is one of the really great live engineers still working–was going to be in town. What to do? How about both? Call it a generational thing or a passing of the torch or just a cop-out on our part but we decided to talk to both of them. And, age and experience notwithstanding, they both had some interesting thoughts on the current state of live event audio.