With stops across the globe in a variety of different venues and Bublé performing along with a big band, the Crazy Love tour poses some audio challenges. The brass players have the most cues of all the musicians on the tour, making proper monitoring critical to the performance.
"Ease of setup and tear down were key factors when selecting gear for the tour," says Louis-Philippe Maziade, projects manager, sound department for Solotech, the Canadian production company handling the equipment and crew for the tour. "The Aviom personal mixing system sounds good and its ability to easily retain and recall presets for mixes on a daily basis is a plus. Now all the members of the brass section are able to achieve their desired mix directly at their fingertips and recall that customized mix for every show with minimal effort."
The Aviom personal mixers also reduce the workload for the monitor mixer handling mixes for the big band. "Being a one-man monitor mixer, taking care of a 13-piece band plus Michael, is a challenging task to say the least," says Craig Brittain, monitor mixer.
"Aviom helps to take a little weight off of my shoulders by allowing our brass section to mix their own IEMs. My own research and product testing, along with comments from industry coworkers, helped me decide that Aviom was the right choice for the 'Crazy Love' tour. Also, the durability of Aviom is important. I have had to do very little repairs to my setup over the three years I have been using the products."
The monitoring setup for the tour is a multiple station system comprised of eight Aviom A-16II personal mixers. An A16-D A-Net Distributor, which is fed directly from a DiGiCo SD7 equipped with a D-16c A-Net Card, supplies signals and power to each personal mixing station. All of the musicians use molded in-ear monitors from Westone.
(Jim Evans)
