However, by the time the 2005 Grammy awards rolled around, West had broken through and was on top of the pile with 10 nominations and three awards, including best rap album for Dropout and best rap song for Jesus Walks. West followed that debut with the multi-platinum Late Registration, which once again snagged him abundant Grammy awards, and has cemented his place as arguably the biggest name in hip-hop today.
West's recent Touch the Sky tour was originally supposed to be a double bill with rock supergroup U2, but midway through U2 cancelled the rest of their dates, and West has been headlining since. It was a monster of a show, playing arenas through Europe and then Australia, New Zealand, and Japan with sellout crowds of 3,000 to 10,000. But West's enthusiastic fans clearly hear every word of his rap and feel every thump of the beat thanks to a sound system specified and supplied by London's Canegreen Ltd. and built around Meyer Sound's MILO family of self-powered loudspeakers.
The scope of the production was considerable, says FOH mixer John C. Clark III. "We have a very large lighting crew; an orchestra that features four cellos, eight violins, and a harp; a DJ; and vocalists; plus the volume requirements - in terms of sheer volume and sound pressure, we're producing 105-115db at the front-of-house position every night."
Clark meets the demands by utilizing two main configurations for the tour. In smaller arenas, he flies 12 MICA compact high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers and groundstacks six 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers on each of side the stage, supplemented by four MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers groundstacked for frontfill. Additional frontfill is provided by UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers, MSL-4 horn-loaded long-throw loudspeakers, and legacy, conventionally-powered MSL-2 reinforcement loudspeakers.
In larger venues Clark pull out all the stops, using four M3D line array loudspeakers, eight MILO cabinets, four MICA units, and nine 700-HP subwoofers per side. Canegreen worked out the system designs in Meyer Sound's MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program, and the system is time-aligned nightly. After that, the show is relatively painless. "By the time everything's up and the system tech says 'we're ready,' it takes maybe 10 minutes for us to adjust everything. That's real important to us, because if Kanye wants to rehearse, we need to be ready to go quickly."
As with many hip-hop shows, the biggest sonic hurdle is reproducing loud and distortion-free bass. "That's the challenge: not just pumping out low end but pumping out clear low end," says Clark. "It's so easy to get distorted [bass] because you're trying for sheer volume. You've always got to turn the main [loudspeaker] stack down so that the subs can keep up, but that wasn't the case with this system. It brought out just the right amount of stuff, it was so easy to get whatever I needed, gain-wise as well as the type of tones that I wanted."
Clark was first exposed to Meyer Sound loudspeakers some years back while doing sound for a comedy show at a 3,000-seat venue in Tucson, Ariz. Despite using arrays of only four M
