REDDITCH, ENGLAND — The three days of the Give It A Name indoor shows in late April are seen as the start of the U.K. festival season, as up-and-coming new alt-rock bands rotate through three venues in England and Scotland. With up to 12 acts a day going through each stage of the early spring festival, this was a great opportunity for an army of different front-of-house engineers to get their hands on the NEXO GEO T line array, running the newly launched NXStream management software.
SSE Audio Group supplied three identical systems for the weekend-long event, with crews headed by seasoned engineers Alex Hall and Matthew Kettle. Each system comprised left/right hangs of 23x NEXO GEO T4805 plus 3x GEO T2815s, with a centre cluster of 5x GEO T cabinets, and 12x CD18s each side. At a pair of Midas Heritage 3000s out front, the crews were working to 5-minute changeovers.
Matt Kettle has made extensive use of NEXO’s tangent array system on several tours with The White Stripes and offered an opinion on the new GEO T system. “Personally, I was extremely impressed. I always find it easy to mix on GEO T, and frankly I am surprised that Nexo has found a way to improve it!”
Mixing front-of-house for Enter Shikari, a hardcore British group, engineer Andy Russell chimed in, “I really liked the clarity and intelligibility of the mix, and that I didn’t have to hack the graphic at all. SSE had set the rigs up really well and the systems sounded great.”
Brad Divens, FOH engineer for Linkin’ Park, worked with Finnish headliners H.I.M. at the G.I.A.N. events. He remembered, “I first mixed on GEO T in Spring 2003, and it seemed to be missing something. Now it sounds great, aggressive and in your face, it’s a very responsive, powerful and complete system.”
Give It a Name began in 2005; for 2007, it expanded — beginning in Germany and Paris before moving on to the British Isles where it played in England and Scotland. A weekend crowd of more than 25,000 came to Earls Court in London for a bill dominated by pop-punk and emo bands like H.I.M from Finland, Brand New and Juliette & The Licks from the USA, and Enter Shikari from the U.K.
For further information, please see www.nexo-sa.com.
