Sean Busby-Little was once again FOH engineer with Duncan Wild on monitors, and the Fearless crew comprised Martin Shaw as FOH babysitter and James Clarke who was system technician and monitor babysitter. "Everything on this tour was live," Busby-Little said. "We were using the Opus AT1000 system. Generally I was running two mid/high boxes and two or four subs a side and two to four in-fills, depending on the venue shape and size. "Unlike the last tour, when we combined our rig with the house systems, I didn't need to on this tour because the dispersion of the Opus system is so good. It's really easy to fill the room with sound, because this system is very efficient and has a lot of clarity. The system works with you: you don't have to work the EQ hard at all to achieve the sound you are looking for."
Opus amplifiers and crossovers were used along with one XTA GQ600 graphic equalizer per side and another for two sets of in-fills, plus five more GQ600s for monitors. In the racks Sean had a pair of DP324 SiDD digital dynamics units providing compression and dynamic EQ for Bob's guitar and accordion and a Korg T3 sampler. Sometimes I brought the gate in on Bob's vocal if we were playing a small room and there was too much noise coming down his microphone," adds Busby-Little. "I had the new XTA C2 digital compressor on the piano, and four G2 dual gates on the drum kit and one on the kit vocal, again to try and cut down the background noise.
"I love them, the gates especially. It's about time we had another decent gate on the market. It's so good I think it will eventually become an industry standard unit, once enough engineers have used them. The key filtering is superb, and having the input and output metering gives you a lot more idea of what's going through the unit.
"As for the sound - you can't hear them. It seems like there's nothing there, but you know they're there working for you. You can't hear them opening and shutting even if you go for a really loose or tight gate; there's no noise at all from it. Definitely one of the benefits of having a digital gate.
"Using the Opus system is like having a hi-fi on, which is perfect for Bob's music. He goes through so many different areas of music, from a moody, quiet acoustic song to a full-on rock'n'roll song. It delivers on both aspects: hard and punchy and rocky, or very mellow."
(Lee Baldock)
