"We are very experienced with in-ear monitoring for orchestras and have specific systems that we use," says Da Capo founder and sound designer for the tour, Rob van der Meijs. "Initially, monitor speakers were requested, but the sound level on stage should be as low as possible so we recommended in-ears instead."
Using a system devised by Da Capo, every musician was supplied with his or her own personal amplifier. This enabled them to listen to the mix from the monitor engineer and to mix in the vocal and their own instrument to the total mix.
"This involves a large number of mixes and close mic'ing for the orchestra, so we needed a lot of inputs, which is why we chose to use DiGiCo consoles," continues van der Meijs, "Of course, it is also tailored to the equipment we own, and we own DiGiCo consoles [supplied by DiGiCo's Dutch distributor, TM Audio], which are very flexible and are capable of handling the number of inputs and outputs we needed."
SD7s were chosen for both the monitor and FOH positions. "The SD7 could have handled both the orchestra and the band, which comprised a drummer, a bass player and Tim on piano, then there are Tim's vocals and the drummer and bass player's backing vocals. But Tim has his own FOH engineer, Matt Simmons, and he wanted him to do the band sound, so we added a second console at FOH - an SD8 36 - and we did the same for Fraser Munro on monitors, but with an SD8 24.
"Because of this, there was a need to share racks and make cross mixes. The DiGiCo's MADI connections are ideal for this. All consoles were on the same world clock and we could make connections between racks and consoles, or share racks and make connections between consoles, all using MADI.
"We gave Simmons his own rack for the band and provided analogue splits. For the orchestra, we had only one set of racks and used gain tracking."
(Jim Evans)
