A pretty strong statement, but with Ed just completing a short, but hugely successful, run of gigs at London's Wembley Stadium and Croke Park in Dublin, selling out every date and playing to a total audience of over 400,000, Chris had to be sure he was working with the best tools for the job. For him, an essential element is his SD7.
Chris has been a DiGiCo advocate for many years, but the SD7, used in conjunction with an SD-Mini Rack on stage, is now his favourite. "The pre amps are incredibly natural, they really sound musical," he says. "There's so much you can do with Dynamic EQ and Compression; the need for additional outboard is negated by the power within the console itself. As long as I have my SD7, I have everything I need. The SD-Mini Rack sits on the stage end. The cool thing about that is that I can have a small amount of I/O within the rack"
He adds, "I do all the monitoring from within the SD7 from FOH, as well as all media feeds and the audio feeds to video world, which are mainly for tempo related stuff. We also have a lot of effects for looping that get fed into the looper to go back out to Ed. So there may be only 13 inputs, but there are also 42 output busses and 39 input related busses
"Ed had a monitor engineer a while ago, but it didn't really work for him," says Chris, "He wanted to have everything that came out of the console to be consistent. He's all about consistency because of the way he builds his loops; he needs to know that no one is effecting or changing the sound. If a monitor engineer is changing something, then Ed will change the way he's playing and that could significantly alter the way things sound for the audience. Even if it's not sounding exactly as he'd want it to at the start, he'd rather stick with that than change it part way through a set."
To aid this, Chris has changed the way he handles delays. "Ed and I can play off each other in terms of FOH and monitors, and that's something that can only be derived from FOH. And it's working really well," he says.
Chris has been using a combination of DiGiCo, Meyer Sound and Sennheiser equipment throughout, all serviced by Major Tom. It has all travelled the world faultlessly, standing up to anything and everything they've thrown at it from several metres of snow to the baking sun of Dubai.
* Sennheiser's 2000 series wireless monitors and its flagship Digital 9000 Series microphones were in use throughout the tour, with the latter, according to front-of-house and monitor engineer Chris Marsh, having revolutionised Ed's sound.
Chris decided to change microphone during Ed's last US tour, using Digital 9000 for his vocal, loop vocal and guitar. "Digital 9000 Series has changed our lives," says Chris. "We had been looking at ways of moving Ed's guitar away from being wired, but we hadn't found a good enough wireless system for him to lose the cable, which he'd been using since the very beginning. That was until we tried Digital 9000; unlike others we tried, we found it sounded even better than the cable.
"From an audio point of view, his vocal became a lot more prominent and his guitar sounded more natural. On top of that we've been doing stadiums, so having something that has such strong RF capability made a real difference. It meant that Ed could be up to 50m away from the receivers and still have rock-solid reception. It's made a really big difference to the show and to Ed's ability to move around the stage."
(Jim Evans)
