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Tour profile: Mariah Carey
Saturday 20 January 2007
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| Mariah Carey sings
through a bejeweled Shure KSM9. |
With 30-plus-years' experience as a front-of-house engineer, including outings with
Sting, James Taylor and Paul Simon, it's safe to say that Howard Page has seen his
share of unusual tour requirements. Perhaps the most surprising specs he's encountered
are on the current Mariah Carey tour, for which the songstress has requested a
collection of bejeweled microphones. "The microphone's jewels have to match the dress
she's wearing, and that changes three, four or five times a night," reports Page, who
now serves as director of engineering at Clair Bros./Showco. "So we have about five or
six different mics for her."
So far, Page and the rest of the crew on the Adventures of Mimi tour have watched the
ballad-queen-turned-hip-hop superstar rotate the inventory of microphones at arena shows
in Tunisia, Japan, China and all across the United States. When Carey, her four-piece
band, three backup singers and a handful of dancers stopped at the Oracle Arena (Oakland,
Calif.) in early October, she used silver, black and gold mics.
The all-Clair Bros. tour is carrying an i4 array. Most of the adjustments are made
during production rehearsals, leaving Page time to speak about the amount of coverage
he is getting from the front and side arrays. "When you attempt to extend the horizontal
coverage of a line array system, you have to be incredibly careful," he explains. "You
want to have minimal overlap of the pattern of the main [to avoid] comb filtering, and
you want a perfect continuation of the horizontal coverage of the main array. Not only
perfect in terms of the dispersion of the main array versus the sides, but also
time-aligned. Instead of using artificial methods to make those two systems match, I
have designed them such that they are rigged in a perfect arc."
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| Front-of-house engineer
Howard Page gives Carey's audience "an acoustic breath" in-between pop and hip
hop songs. |
Page also spent a fair amount of time perfecting the bottom end, designing a steered
sub-bass array. "My role is typically to go out to tours and fix things that are not
right, and I've been out to many tours where the bottom end is an over-the-top,
gut-wrenching, awful noise," he continues. "Sometimes it's a gain structure problem,
but usually it's a balance problem."
On this tour, Page is using Prism II subs. "They give me an absolute depth-defined
note," he says. "They may not be as musical as other subs, but the idea is that for
the level that I'm running this show, which is quite loud, I want the tightness. The
trade-off, unfortunately, is that I have to sacrifice some depth in the low end to
get that definition and hear those notes."
By steering the subs, he adds, he has virtually eliminated the summing in the middle
of the stage. "I've evened it out across the floor," Page says. "When you do that, if
you create a true steered array, it not only sounds good on the floor, but it ends
up sounding good in the high seats, as well."
To cover the expensive seats in the front rows, Page is using eight FF2 front-fill
cabinets. "I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I have the middle set on one delay and
the outer set on another," the FOH engineer comments. "The idea with front-fill delays
is that you want the image to appear bigger than it really is. That environment in
the first two rows is always a bit tricky to get right because if you just put little
front-fill speakers down there and turn them on, that is all those people will hear.
They don't get any feeling that they are in a big gig."
Speakers aside, Page is using a fairly straight-ahead setup at FOH that includes a
Yamaha PM5D console and Clair Bros. I/Os driving the system. "In a normal situation
with my sound system, the I/Os at front of house are almost straight-through devices,"
Page explains. "I'm using them as my D-to-A converters for the output of the Yamaha
PM5D. I stay in digital all the way to the I/Os at 96k and then I convert and run
analog to my [dbx] DriveRack."
Page doesn't rely on much outboard gear - just a touch of onboard limiting and a TC
Electronic 6000 multi-effects processor for reverb on Carey's ballads. "I see guys
have compressors on every channel and gates all over the place," Page says. "Sometimes
that's valid, but what I notice is that it distracts from them mixing the show."
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| Monitor engineer Robert Miller
chose the Digidesign VENUE digital console for its availability and plug-ins. |
At the monitor position, Robert Miller is using a Digidesign VENUE to mix eight pairs
of stereo personal monitors, a mix for the engineers below the stage, a mix for monitors
that are flown over the stage and placed on the side of the stage for the dancers, and
a shaker and a sub. "There are lot of things going on," he says with a laugh, "but I
try to keep it as simple and straightforward as I can."
Carey uses Ultimate Ears personal monitors, and, yes, the pieces have bling, while the
band and backup singers use Future Sonics models. Miller delivers all onstage a
straight-ahead mix. "There is nothing too crazy going on," he says. "Everybody gets a
nice blended mix. I've worked on some tours where the music is in their left ear and
the vocals in their right ear. It's not like that. Everyone has a stereo mix with good
separation." The flown and side monitor cabinets are Clair Bros. R4s.
Knowing that this tour was going to take them across the globe, Miller picked the
VENUE board for its availability and kept the list of plug-ins simple. "I stuck with
the standard Digidesign plug-ins so I can get them wherever we go," he explains. "I
didn't want to be needing something that wasn't available." Troodon Technologies'
TrooTrace Audio Analysis Bundle, which he uses as a spectrum analyzer, is one of his
more useful plug-ins.
Where it gets challenging, though, is when Carey sings with videotaped performances by
such artists as Jay-Z and Jermaine Dupri on the more rap-flavored tracks. "She interfaces
with [the video] and Mariah winds vocally in and out between the rap track with this
larger-than-life hip hop feel going on behind her," Page says. "The essential thing is
that you have to have the gain structure on your console completely in control at all
times. In those circumstances, if you're not careful of the overall level you're running
or of the interplay between all of the elements of your mix at all times, it will
train-wreck in a heartbeat."
That's especially true, Page adds, with so many elements to juggle. "There's the little
rap section, now it's back to Mariah, now a little keyboard riff, now a scratch hook
from the DJ," he describes. "Suddenly, you get a situation that I call ‘everything
louder than everything else,' and you've lost any reference point of your mix."
This tour, featuring Carey's catalog of songs that bounces between ballads and hip hop
tracks, has given Page an opportunity to prove a philosophy that he's worked with since
early in his career. "Excessive low end fatigues an audience, and three-quarters of the
way through a show, you notice that they are not as excited and up for the next song
as they were in the beginning," Page says. "It's essentially because, psycho-acoustically,
you are beating them to a pulp with the low end. When I get an opportunity, I give the
audience what I call 'an acoustic breath'."
"There's an interesting psychological thing that goes on with an audience," he continues.
"They scream their heads off during the show, but when she starts a ballad, they scream
for about four words of a song and rather than me turning it up to fight them, I leave
it where it is and they all stop screaming. They are essentially here to hear the song.
If you give them a dynamic breath, they will come back and they'll listen."
(Mix Online - Heroes of Mariah)
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