Pasi Harra gets immersive with KLANG
- Details
What being around the serious sonic horsepower that heavy-metal music engenders has taught Hara is that anything he can do to make the monitoring environment for his musicians safer, more comfortable, and more accurate - but without sacrificing impact - he’ll gladly do. And the KLANG immersive in-ear monitor mixing system has become his primary tool of choice to accomplish just that.
“I first heard about the KLANG platform when it popped up on my Facebook feed,” he recalls, speaking from his home in the Los Angeles area, where he moved his family about seven years ago. “I thought, ‘I need to take a look at this.’ So I went to their website, watched the videos, then emailed them, saying, ‘You have my full attention.’”
What he could accomplish using KLANG:fabrik was made clear the first time he tried it out in 2014 with Guns ‘N' Roses guitarist Slash on one of his solo shows in Germany. The band was loud and there was a lot of bleed into lead singer Miles Kennedy’s microphone, and thus into his IEMs.
“By just applying the KLANG to that situation, moving the guitar to the side in Miles’ ears and keeping the vocal in front, the overall volume had gone down 9 to 10 dB and all the bleed was gone,” Hara recalls. “He wasn’t fighting the guitar in his monitor anymore - in the 3D mix, it was behind him and to the side, just like it was on stage -and I didn’t have to do the usual carving out of frequencies for them to coexist. It was amazing and I was sold on KLANG.”
KLANG:fabrik worked just as well for System of a Down, particularly for drummer John Dolmayan. Hara brought the KLANG system into a rehearsal and set up the drum kit virtually to reflect how Dolmayan perceives it from the drum throne: an array of five toms, plus a pair of kicks. “I remember that John sat down behind the kit, went around the toms once, then looked at me and said, ‘What did you do?’ And before I could answer, he said, ‘Don’t touch anything. It’s perfect.’ John’s a very precise drummer and tends to look straight ahead when he plays, so everything in his in-ears is exactly as it is right in front of him.”
Since then, Hara has used his KLANG:fabrik pair on virtually all of his clients, including Ebi, The Cult, KISS, Slipknot, and Stone Temple Pilots. More recently, Hara has also expanded his KLANG universe with a new DMI-KLANG card, which he uses with a DiGiCo SD5 console via an Orange Box, or by plugging it directly into one of the DMI slots found on the back of a new Quantum225 or Quantum338 desks.
