Sixty years into his career Sir Tom Jones is recently wrapping a 74-date tour of the UK, Europe and North America. The Ages & Stages Tour showcases songs from throughout his career, with an SSL Live L550 Plus console at FOH and a Live L100 Plus on a B rig for some tight turnarounds on the European leg of the tour.
Gavin Tempany is at FOH for the tour explaining that ‘with the routing of this tour we have to have two sets of equipment. On the A rig, I have an L550 Plus, which offers 38 faders as standard. On the B rig, I’m using an L100 Plus with an external Fader Tile, providing a total of 26 faders – 14 on the console itself and 12 more with the remote Fader Tile.’
As he puts it himself, Tempany has been ‘on both ends of the multicore’ during a career that has seen him mix either monitors or front-of-house for artists including Tame Impala, Genesis, Mark Knopfler, Kylie Minogue, Hans Zimmer and David Gilmour.
One benefit of working with SSL’s Live console system is the ease with which a showfile can be loaded into console models of different physical configurations, such as between the L550 Plus and the L100 Plus. ‘You don’t need any conversion software to make it work,’ Tempany says. ‘If you don’t have enough DSP or channels available, then the board goes into compatibility mode. When you’re on a smaller console, you can choose which channels are active. The next time you take that showfile to a bigger console, the other channels just reappear.’
When he programming the SSL Live showfile ahead of the tour, Tempany worked with a multitrack from an earlier leg that was recorded through a previous console. ‘I could listen to my mix and with one button I could flick over to the recorded mix, and the difference was staggering. The SSL mix was clearer, wider and deeper,’ he reports.
The only outboard effect on this tour is a Bricasti reverb: ‘Everything else is on the console,’ Tempany elaborates. ‘Whereas, on the previous console, I had to have a Waves rig. I always try and have as little stuff hanging off the console as possible.
‘I don’t use any compression on the mix bus but I do use just a tiny bit of dynamic EQ, just a bit of 3kHz and a bit of 800Hz,’ he continues. ‘When a mix gets loud, it can get a bit shrill, so I like to have that and a little bit on Sir Tom’s vocal. His mic technique is consistent night to night. I know what lines he sings loud so rather than compress it, I just do it manually. There is a compressor on it, but it’s set at 2:1 and a threshold of -10dB; it maybe comes on once in a show.’
Like many engineers, Tempany mixes using VCAs, programming 12 faders as VCA groups with another block of 12 faders for more granular control of individual channel sources. He programs the band –drums, bass, two guitarists with multiple electric and acoustic instruments, keyboards and backing tracks, where applicable – as well as Jones’ vocal into VCA groups and stores them at 0dB.
‘The unique thing is that the Live has a store scope. I have everything in the store scope except for those VCAs, so no matter what I do, they won’t get stored in a weird position,’ he says. ‘Every time I go to a new scene, all the channel faders have moved to their preset positions and the VCA is reset back to zero. That is one reason why I can get away with fewer faders, because my VCAs always reset.’
When Tempany moved to the SSL Live mid-tour earlier this year, he says, ‘I pulled up one of the template files – which I highly recommend everyone starting from, because they’re really good – and then transferred all the settings of the channels and groups from the previous board. Within that template show file there is the ability to submix using stems, and the effects are also set up using stems. Stems afford the ability to have another set of variable auxes that sit between the channels and the auxiliaries in the signal flow. They can feed anywhere onwards, but they could also feed other stems. It lets you subgroup things to auxiliaries, that’s the bonus. If you’re doing monitors and you want to subgroup all of the drum kit to one stereo stem group, you can. And everyone can have that group at a different level. I have a kick stem, a snare stem and an overall drum group stem, a band stem and a vocal stem.’
He continues: ‘I think there’s a misconception about the SSL Live; people think that it’s a difficult board to operate. What I will say is that it’s different – but it’s not difficult.’
‘I find with rock and roll sometimes the way to keep things sounding good is to keep it quite simple,’ he advises. ‘It’s good to not overthink it.’
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