Pro Sound News - Privet Investigations

Privet Investigations
Comments on Meyer Speakers from Neil Finn’s FOH Mixer

Pro Sound News Europe - December 1998
by Phil Ward

FOH man Chris ‘Privet’ Hedge praises on-the-fly mixing in the face of rampant technology

UK - There once was a time when a performer stood with an acoustic guitar, open mic’d and listening to himself on wedges. The engineer had to ride the faders as each song ebbed and flowed, and the artist picked songs at random from an ad hoc set list dictated more by the audience than a computer. People loved it.

This time was called October 1998: the performer was former Crowded House frontman Neil Finn and the engineer was Chris ‘Privet’ Hedge, a past master of rock and roll touring taking, with some relief, a busman’s holiday from the battery of technological assistance now available to the live act.

Not that he’s a luddite. As FOH engineer for Genesis, Hedge has employed all of the state-of-the-art sound design techniques money can buy - and one or two it couldn’t, no doubt. It’s just that, when the occasion demands, it’s sometimes a good idea to keep things simple and trust in the basic requirements of sound reinforcement. Like bloody good loudspeakers, for example...

“A Meyer Sound box is a very natural sounding box,” Hedge opines, backstage at London’s prestigious Festival Hall, where his Meyer-based system supplied by rental company Canegreen has just been acoustically dovetailed into the venue. “And because it’s trapezoidal the coverage is great. The high and the mid information is the most important thing when you’re doing theatres with this kind of music. Our Albert Hall show really demonstrated this. Everywhere you went except in ‘the lap of the gods’, of course - the mids and highs were fantastic, even when interfacing with the 3s and 2s.

Neil Finn “One thing about Meyer boxes is that you can use pretty much any of them together - the UPAs or the MSL2s - and they work fine. They interact well together and the general tonal quality is the same for all of them. That really helps to keep the coverage smooth.”

Unlike most arenas, theatres come in all sorts of shapes and sizes - so versatility is paramount.

“Yeah, we tend to have stuff pointing everywhere,” Hedge admits. “Also, you know what it’s like with sold-out shows. The promoter will see an empty seat somewhere awkward and sell it as well - and they don’t tell you they’ve done it first thing in the morning, either....

“But you can put up a small cluster of Meyer and straight away it sounds tonally good, even if you’re standing off-axis. Coverage is everything. There’s nothing worse than a system which sounds joyous where you’re mixing, but 20 yards to the left sounds horrible. And obviously being self-powered there’s no amplifiers on stage, which helps. We’ve got quite a lot of monitors and stage space is at a premium.

“We started off in New Zealand using Flashlight, which was great but it could be a little bit peaky in the smaller rooms. This is one of those tours where if it gets too loud, it’s just wrong - there’s no two ways about it. And when we got to Australia we had the opportunity to use Canegreen’s MSL4s, which in the theatres we were doing were perfect. You could turn it on, run it up through an SM58, a Summit and a Lexicon and it sounded exactly like it does when you’re standing next to him.”

Drawing the audience closer to the artist could be a definition of the engineer’s traditional role, in fact...

“That’s really what you’re there to do. Neil’s type of music is very natural and organic in its feel, and the way that he plays and interacts with the audience is all very natural - and you want the sound to reflect that.

Neil Finn There are a few important effects, like a Leslie and so on, but we decided on a strategy from day one. You can get really clever with the gear and disappear up your own arse, for want of a better phrase. You can easily over-complicate things, so we knew we wanted to keep it very simple. There’s a lot of input channels, admittedly, because there’s quite a few things which are used only once. There’s even an old record player up there, which is used for the odd bit of music which gets thrown in - like a bit of Relaxing With Rona, an Australian keep-fit record. It’s a pretty laid back vibe to the show...”

But even with Rona on board, the potential acoustic expanse of a tour promoting a new album recorded in New Zealand - with due ethnic vocal and percussion accoutrements - is avoided.

“There are quite a few unusual percussion instruments up there,” Hedge explains, “but no Maori choir. We realised that to capture the full breadth of the album’s sounds we’d be up to 70 channels or so, and the show would have to be a set-piece thing. Every song would have to be constructed and sculpted; the set-list would have to be more or less in the same order each night. As it is, Neil can just shout out a song and the band plays it.

“That’s how the whole system has been set up. We’ve got a Yamaha PM4000, so there’s no programming or anything like that involved. You just punch through all your mutes and off you go with the next song.

“I came to this tour straight from nine months with Genesis, so it’s been like black and white. There were no rehearsals for Neil’s tour, so it had to be a PM4000. They’re so reliable; you could drop one out of aeroplane and it would still work. We had a Midas XL4 with Genesis, and it was brilliant for a set-piece show like that - although I ran the MIDI from a separate computer. I’d never use the XL4 at the sharp end of the MIDI, I just don’t think it’s reliable enough. But the set list was on a laminate - that’s how fixed it was, because of the projections and the presets and everything.