Back out with Oasis again for their world 2008 – 2009 tour.
I hope I can go the distance!
After engineering a few recent tours with Silverchair and Wolf Mother I found myself back with the Midas analogue consoles and really liked what I was hearing.
I have to say that being back on the XL4 is to me what sound is all about. I just personally feel that when mixing a rock band it is the way to go. Maybe it's the last 25 years mixing analogue or you can't teach and old dog new tricks but hey I'm having a great time on the XL4.
As you may know by now JAS has just purchased a D&B J line array system and it is also now the system I'm using for Oasis on their current tour. I engineered a few shows for the Killers a few years back and one was with the J system and I had one of my best mixes on it so I felt it would be the way forward for JAS and also the system of choice for Oasis.
This tour started in the US August 2008 and we contacted 8thday sound to supply the system. I had recently been talking with Tom Arko re purchasing the system and getting involved with the J system so 8th day was our choice.
From the first time we ran the system up we all knew how good it sounded. We ran the system up with the pink noise and the analyser was pretty much flat to 14k…Yes 14k! I have never seen a system which ran that high and flat straight out of the box.
So far the J system has sounded great and I'm having a great time mixing and everyone from the truck drivers to the cleaners have commented on the sound.
Also 8thdaysound supplied a great system with some great crew. The system presentation was the best I seen so far and I would like to thank Tom Arko and Owen and the rest of their staff for some great service.
Also, after a few discussions with Mike at Britrow and the fact that JAS has recently purchased some Outline Butterfly I decided to give the Butterfly line array system a go for the UK arena tour and I have to say it did sound great. I have mentioned elsewhere in our site that the Outline gear really stands up to whatever we throw at it as this was not different. Britrow supplied a great system and crew as well, and the Outline people were great with their support. A big thanks to Peter Barnard from Outline UK and Giorgio from Outline Italy.
JAS recently bought a Butterfly system for the Forum theatre in Melbourne and we have currently also put one into the Palace theatre as well. Also the Hi Fi bar in Melbourne recently bought a Butterfly system. The system has been giving us great results and a lot of good reports on the sound in these venues.
That's about it for now. Oasis have a large stadium tour mid 09' and we have tons of D&B J system (Supplied by Wigwam) so I'm really looking forward to mixing the stadiums. Oasis sold 500,000 tickets in 2 hours so I feel it's going to be huge. I've put up a diagram of the current stadium system design. We're going to fly a heap of J subs and run 30 B2 subs across the front in Cardioid mode. We look like running multiple towers of Butterfly for the delays.