Blitz consultant, Dave Perry, explained: "Although we had built up a relationship with producer Sacha Brooks when he did The Graduate, we still had to tender for the show." The Full Monty is essentially a strong musical show - with a 12-piece rock band and 21 in the cast - and Mike Walker's sound design for the production needed to reflect this. The production uses a distributed, highly-automated system with a lot of discrete channels. According to Dave Perry: "All 32 matrix outputs of the desk are being used so every output has something inline with it."
Consequently, for the bulk of the processing Mike Walker has deployed nine FDS-366 Omnidrive Compact Plus and three FDS-336 Minidrives, with delay and EQ on the radio mics and then delay on the loudspeakers for the circle and front fills. And because the front of the stage at the Prince of Wales is curved there are three time taps on the front fills.
Mike Walker confirmed that the BSS FDS-366’s are used for outboard processing the main system, including the curve corrections and delay speakers, while the FDS-336’s are deployed on some inventive switching of the surround speakers, and BSS TCS-804 dual time correctors handle the insert delays on the sub group for the radio mics. Mike Walker commented: "We use BSS because it’s so reliable. We try and make the sound as transparent as possible and we find that the Omnidrives don’t affect the sound as much as other digital processors."
(Lee Baldock)
