FOH Interview

Live engineer Jay Phebus is a lucky man. He has been mixing a band he loves, King's X, for more than two decades. Since 1984, when King's X was still a Midwestern circuit band, he has been their soundman, and by the early '90s he had also taken over as their tour manager following a string of short-lived TMs, which has made his job challenging, to say the least. While attending the University of Mississippi Phebus originally intended to enter the Air Force, but allergies prevented his admission into the flight program, so he answered the call when King's X–bassist/vocalist Doug Pinnick, guitarist Ty Tabor and drummer Jerry Gaskill–needed help and left school. Since then, he has toured the world with them, from headlining club gigs to opening slots for AC/DC. During downtime, he has mixed other artists, including Stevie Wonder, Vertical Horizon, Eric Gales, Galactic Cowboys and George Thorogood.

Looking out over the Mandalay Bay Arena in Las Vegas where INXS would be performing that night, Delicate Productions' Smoother Smyth recalled how he started working with the band when they were first starting their career in the States: "I was in my office, and the receptionist called and said there was a band there to see me. I asked her to repeat that, because sound companies rarely deal directly with bands, but she repeated that there was a band there and they wanted to speak to me. 'What's their name?' I asked. And she said, "I don't know. It's INCS or something like that. "I asked where they were from, and she answered, 'Australia.' So I said, 'Right. Go up the road to the liquor store and get a case of Fosters and bring it back here.'"

Cirque Du Soleil may like tents, but they dispense with the notion of three rings. In fact, their first arena tour (called Delirium) features a stage that cuts every venue in half so that the show is viewed from two different sides of an auditorium. It's a giant catwalk that allows performers and musicians to prowl across the expanse of an arena, and it's also a huge challenge for the sound designer, line engineer and every technical person involved.

How much abuse can a traveling analog FOH console take before it expires? Mary McFadden knows the answer. The sound engineer for the national touring company of the hit musical Chicago dealt with that issue recently after spending two years on the road with a faltering analog board sandwiched within digital gear.

The Tony Award-winning Chicago is already a challenging show with its concertstyle production where the bandstand with full band onstage, also the centerpiece of the scenic design, is a substitute for the traditional pit orchestra. A little over a year ago, McFadden and Chicago's sound system designer, Scott Lehrer, decided to remove a badly limping analog FOH console for Yamaha's digital PM5D desk. The touring show's production package was a more modest adaptation of a system designed for the 1,587-seat Schubert Theater in Manhattan. At the start of the national tour in May 2003, a Yamaha DM2000 sidecar was substituted into the system to replace an analog board, and it was joined to a smaller mainframe analog desk, to shrink the mix-position footprint in the smaller venue. But within two years, the analog desk began to develop problems that eventually required its retirement.

How many times have you encountered a lead singer with an attitude? Like he consistently comes to work with the right attitude each day, excels at his job and seems to have a sense of just being a regular guy on and off the stage? Well, that's Paul McCartney, the guy Pablo Boothroyd mixes for each night.

Pab will tell you it is business as usual to record each sound check and each show for every stop on a Paul McCartney tour. This time, the job also entailed sending two songs live, as they happened, to a couple of astronauts for a morning wake-up call in space. A Paul McCartney tour also usually results in a live CD and a tour DVD, as well as some goodies used for Internet content. When it comes to the art of the concert tour and everything that surrounds it, and I mean everything, Paul McCartney is simply one of the best to work for out there and he just keeps on doing it better and better. Pab and I each pulled up a road case and sat down for a look-see at the Front of House position used on the 11-week Paul McCartney US tour.

Dave Skaff won the Parnelli Award for Monitor Mixer of the Year in 2005 for his work on the current U2 tour, which is keeping his hands full. In addition to it being a very high profile gig with a band that expects a lot, monitor world is under the stage, so he has to rely on video feeds and a complex talkback system to communicate with his clients. All that and he is using a new console…

The PMG (Australia's version of the Federal Communications Commssion) had been driving around in their vans when they triangulated the location of the lawbreakers. Converging on the high school, we don't know what they expected to find, though we know what they didn't expect: 16-year-old "criminal" and future Parnelli Innovator Award honoree Bruce Jackson.

Jackson and some buddies who shared his passion for all things electronic thought it would be fun to build a radio station, and they were broadcasting illegally from the school assembly hall after school. But it got the attention of the authorities because their unusual wizardry led to such a long antenna and strong signal that they were actually broadcasting across all Sydney.