Tempah has just finished a tour of some of the UK's best known arenas and he, his band have and his audio crew have appreciated both the quality of Sennheiser's product and the back up that they receive from the company and in particular special projects manager, Phil Cummings.
Tinie's microphone of choice is a 'blinged' SKM 2000 handheld and his in ear monitoring system is a combination of SR2000 and EK2000 (also blinged) which, says monitor engineer Raphael Williams, have proved to be particularly effective, especially in festival situations.
"We use the in ears for clarity and noise reduction," he reports. "They give definition, clarity and directness - and reduce injury for others. If you want to deafen yourself, that's up to you, but you don't damage anyone else's hearing. We also utilise ambient mics, so that Tinie can feel like he's in the room.
"The ears cable acts like an antenna, so you have that extra strength of signal which keeps the connection much stronger and is a real improvement, especially at festivals because there's no drop out on stage."
For the band, there is a combination of G2 in ears with an AC3000 active antenna combiner, A5000-CP passive antenna and two A2003 active 4:1 antenna combiners. Microphones are SKM 2000s with e906 capsule for cabs, e904 for toms/snare and e 905, plus Neumann KM184s for the aforementioned overheads.
"We have a couple of Neumanns KM184s on the hi hats and 904s on the snares, which are great. Because the drum kit is so big - five toms, three snares and a kick and loads of cymbols - that we can't really have stands, especially for the second snare, which is quite a deep sound and the 904s are great. Our guitarist has two cabinets and we use the 906 on the main one, but the lead sound has a condenser."
(Jim Evans)
