Midas PRO6 Used for Jet’s U.S. Tour
NEW YORK – Australian band Jet hit the road in America to support the group's latest album, Shaka Rock. Manning the controls at front of house was veteran mixer Kyle Chirnside, with Will Burston at the monitor desk. The group carried its own front of house console, a Midas PRO6 live audio system supplied by Big Mo Pro, Parsippany, N.J.
I've been using the PRO6 for
two years now. It's my console of choice, said Chirnside. In fact, we did the
first few shows on this tour without it, and I can tell you, it makes a huge
difference. With the digital snake system and on-board processing, the PRO6
really makes everything easier, and helps us get the most out the house rigs we
encounter.
Jet also considered doing a
live album, so all shows on the tour were recorded. For that task, Chirnside
opted for the Klark Teknik DN9696 high resolution audio recorder. Designed to
integrate seamlessly with Midas digital consoles, the DN9696 is a 5 RU
rack-mount device offering 96 tracks of recording at 96 kHz/24-bit resolution.
The 9696 has been flawless
for us, said Chirnside. We're taking the channel outputs right after the
preamps via fiber, pre-fader, with no processing. The recorder sits in monitor
world, so Will Burston is watching it during the show. But really, once you've
got your trim set, all you have to do is hit Record and let it go. We're using
a total of 36 channels, including 5 channels of ambient miking. Channel gain
has basically stayed the same since the first day we started recording, so capturing
and storing each performance is practically automatic.
On the PRO6, Chirnside uses
the Midas POPulation Groups and VCAs to provide access to all elements of his
mix. Jet is a classic five-piece rock band, with two guitars, bass, drums and
keyboards, with all five members contributing vocals. Chirnside dedicates five
of the PRO6's six POP Groups to each band member, with the sixth Group carrying
all the vocals. That way, I can pull up any individual with one button-push,
and I still have all my VCAs available as separate submixes, he said.
The VCAs provide a greater
level of detail, each carrying natural instrument groupings. The drum kit is
split across three VCAs, with kick drum, snare and hi-hat comprising one group,
toms another, and cymbals a third. Similarly, there are VCAs for keyboards,
lead vocals (clean and dirty ), backing vocals and bass. Various reverbs
occupy three more slots.
On the PRO6, the extensive
onboard DSP effects can be set up in a virtual rack for easy access. The effects
sound so good, we don't carry any outboard gear at all, Chirnside said. I'm
using three reverbs – one for snare, another for tom, and one for vocals.
They're all done off the internal DN780 engine. I also run a delay, and the
rest of my effects are stereo 3-band compressors, which gives me a little extra
frequency compression I can call on if I need it, primarily on the main
vocalists.
Jet's opening act, the Crash
Kings, were also mixed on the PRO6, though local openers are usually mixed by
local engineers on the house console. To accommodate this, Chirnside used the
Area B feature to carry the audio from the console, plus a stereo feed for
walking-in music fed from an iPod. This allowed the left side of the console
(Area A) to be dedicated to Jet and Crash Kings settings, with seamless
changeover between acts.
Chirnside, an early PRO6 adopter who has been using
the Midas digital for two full years now, said it's well-suited for tours not
traveling with their own PA. I'll tell you, from using house desks on the
first few shows of this tour to when we picked up the PRO6, it makes a huge
difference, he said. It really livens up the sound of these old house rigs.
In virtually every venue we've played, the house engineer is amazed at how good
their system sounds when it's played through this console.
For more information, please visit www.midasconsoles.com (http://www.midasconsoles.com) .
Source: Midas PRO6 Used for Jet’s U.S. Tour
