Publication: ProSound News
Date: December, 2001
Transcribed by
K[elly] (spiral.out@attbi.com)
K[elly] (spiral.out@attbi.com)
page: 70 title: Tool for the City author: Clive Young New York has seen some dark times recently, but that didn’t dissuade Tool from bringing its bleak hybrid of Goth, metal and prog rock to Madison Square Garden for two sold-out nights. Touring in support of the top-selling Lateralus album, the group used unusual staging, a variety of video screens, acrobats and bombastic music to made its presence known, much as it had at each stop along the tour, which ended last month. Providing audio for the journey was Showco; FOH mixing duties were handled by independent engineer Alan “Nobby” Hopkinson, who has mixed acts like Rage Against the Machine, Joan Aramatrading and Bush, after getting his start in 1980, touring with The Exploited. Much as punk rock evolved in the ensuing decades (he regards Tool as punk), so has live audio gear, finding Nobby behind a Midas XL-4 for the tour. A key to the band’s sound live is bombastic low end, of which Nobby noted “We try to go for the fat sound, and as Stewart [Bennett, system engineer] will verify, we do draw a lot of power. I want it aggressive and fat, but I don’t want that harsh sound. This particular building, we’re running pretty hot. We’re dancing with the system in here, more so than other places because it’s wide and it’s the New York show. Last night the band came in firing a little heavier than they had at soundcheck, so me and Stew were, ‘OK, let’s get a bit of headroom back here’ The first song they play, called "The Grudge," is insanely dynamic – it’s all about drums, so it’s quite a hard number to start with. When you’re trying to judge how the room’s changed, you start to try and reclaim stuff with that song, and when they settle into a lightly more straightforward song, you have to take things back out. So you have to ride the wind then land.” Given the low-end orientation, Nobby tended to keep the sound relatively clean, explaining, “When I came [on to the tour], there were loads of stuff that I didn’t think was suitable for them, so we cleaned a lot of it up. It’s good gear, great for the studio, but there’s a time and place for everything. For the intensity for this, well, we switched some compressors from tube to dbxs, just to harden it up a bit.” Equally hard is the volume on stage. Monitor Chris Gilpin tool on Tool after handling stage sound last year for A Perfect Circle, Tool singer Maynard James Keenan’s other band. Accordingly, Gilpin spent the Tool tour providing a Shure PSM700 personal monitor for Keenan and a variety of loud stage mixes for the rest of the band. One benefit, however, was the unusual stage configuration, which found the bass and guitar at stage front, and the drums and singer on risers at the back. Allowing the video screens to take the audiences’ attention, the band members never left their quadrants, which helped to isolate the vocal mic from the massive onstage volume. The guitar and bass had four Showco BFM 15-inch wedges each, aided and abetted by two Prism cabinets laid down horizontally, used as sidefills; the guitarist also had an extra sub on a separate send – a necessity that arose on the road. “We had a problem where I was actually taking a lot out of the speakers,” Gilpin admitted, ”because I was running it so loud. It made more sense to clean it up, take the low end out of the wedges and give him a sub instead. It worked out great; I can choose to put in low end from specific instruments in there, so I don’t have low end from everything else.” Of course, speaker-busting sound can make a vocal difficult to work with, as Gilpin acknowledged: “You have three guys playing loud music and one guy singing, and he can’t compete with that. Therein lies the problem – separating all the other sound out of his vocal without taking his vocal away. That’s where all the gates come in on the ATI Paragon desk I’m using. I actually have a few channels where everything is duplicated so I can do it one way for the stage and one way for the personal monitors. I have a group for the toms, which runs through and Aural Exciter. I’ve got a left and right mix of all the toms that goes through that. That means I can roll off a lot more low end – it would sound terrible if you put it through the monitor, but it actually works well for the ears, because there’s only so much information you can put through a driver the size of a pin head.” All of which gave the show, with its affecting visuals and dark subject manner, an audio to match. “The show has severe volume and dynamics, and then such quiet,” observed Nobby. “It goes from the sublime to the ‘cor, blimey.”
Posted to t.d.n: 04/01/02 22:39:58