Alongside grossing more than US$135m and being staged him in front of 1.3m fans across 41 shows, including 21 stadia, US country star Kenny Chesney’s Here And Now tour was the first on which FOH engineer Rob Scovill worked with Outline’s Newton FPGA processor.
The tour was originally scheduled to take place in 2020 but was, like so many, derailed by the global pandemic. Chesney eventually moved the tour to 2022 and named it after his album of the same name, bringing support acts Dan+Shay, Carly Pearce and Old Dominion with him. The tour closed in Foxborough, Massachusetts, with two sold-out shows that hosted a total of 122,000 fans.
Clair Global deployed a major audio system for all the concerts, using a combination of its Cohesion CO-12 and CO-10 line arrays and CP-218 subwoofers. The three support acts used Avid, SSL and DiGiCo consoles, while Scovill used another Avid S6L alongside an Avid S6L 24C redundant desk for the headliner.
Scovill is one of the touring world’s most experienced engineers, with a portfolio that includes Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Matchbox Twenty, Prince, Rush, Def Leppard and Alice Cooper. ‘Kenny Chesney’s legendary stadium tours are more akin to a travelling festival in that, hosting multiple acts with headliner pedigrees during a show day, they become a case study in signal management and workflow – especially so at FOH,’ he says.
‘Outline’s Newton provided us a very elegant and hassle free way to onboard multiple AES signals from multiple digital consoles to the Dante network for the PA drive that was designed and implemented by Dave Shatto and Clair Brothers. I’m very impressed by this platform, and I can’t wait to dig in deeper with it for future tours.’
