Stourbridge-based Stage Audio Services supplied the tour's audio equipment and technical crew. Monitor engineer Chris Wright manned the M7CL for opening bands My Passion and Young Guns and Welsh rockers The Blackout brought their own monitor tech who used the M7CL. Headliners All Time Low carried an LS9 and had a flexible approach - a backline tech or even a band member undertaking monitor duties.
"I really like the M7CL's user interface. It's very straightforward to use and easy to explain to other engineers," says Wright.
My Passion and Young Guns alternated playing first and second each night - both bands using wedges, the one performing second also having in-ear monitors for the drummer and lead singer. All members of The Blackout and All Time Low were on IEMs, except for one guitarist of the former band, who was on wedges.
"The Omni outs of the M7CL were incredibly useful," says Wright. "It meant that The Blackout's monitor engineer could leave the transmitters for his IEMs permanently eave the transmitters for his IEMs permanently patched and I could assign to any of the other outputs for my mixes for the support bands. Reverb can be really important when using IEMs and the Rev-X Presets on the M7CL sound great."
With the four acts playing every night and only three non-show days in the fortnight, time was a pressing issue throughout."Having the show file for each band instantly loaded was a great help, especially with the console being so easy to use," continues Wright. "At the very first show there was a noise curfew until 4.30pm. The doors opened at 6.30, so we only had two hours to soundcheck all four bands. But the M7CL is so fast to work with that it was fine."
From that positive start, the entire tour proved a great success. "It went very smoothly, the console worked perfectly throughout. It survived a bottle of beer being spilt over it and didn't glitch at all," concludes Wright.
