Baggy has been performing monitor engineer duties for the chanteuse since her emergence from the television talent series and explains why her Sennheiser equipment - which includes SKM 5200 with an MD 5235 capsule as her main vocal mic, as well as wired microphones such as e901 and e 904s for drums and e906s for guitars, with the band and Alexandra also using ew 300 IEMs - has become such an important element for her shows.
"Sennheiser has been working with Alexandra on my recommendation to her since the very early days after she won The X Factor. Initially they supplied her with a self-designed, personalised SKM 5200 Swarovski microphone via CrystalRoc and a set of ew 300 IEMs that we fly racked for initial promo appearances," he says. "This small system eventually evolved into the basis of the set up that we used on the production tour, with a change being made after evaluating the capsule choices.
"Initially the Neumann KK 105 was the most successful of the capsules we tried, but once we were in the position of playing our own headline shows we evaluated the capsules again and decided to go with the MD 5235 head instead. The decision to change from a condenser to a dynamic head was made simply because of the improvement in clarity when the capsule was being used at very close proximity. This gave Alex the flexibility to get right up close, or back off, as she wanted."
The ew 300 IEM systems have remained constant during the promo and live performances, through to the tour, with the number of units simply increased to cover the band's requirements as well as Alexandra's.
(Jim Evans)
