Adopting Klang immersive monitor mixing, has greatly improved touring with The BossHoss for sound engineer Manuel Knigge, with their recent tour using a DMI-Klang expansion card installed in the band’s DiGiCo SD12 monitor desk. As the monitor mix intelligibility has improved for the German band, Knigge has been freed from extensive soundchecks that were previously required at each venue during a summer of outside events.

Klang expands the stereo field into a 360°fully immersive mix that gives every element the space it requires. In turn, this reduces strain on the brain and ears, reducing fatigue and improving the experience for the artist. Without this consistency, nightly touring required a lot of trial and error, as Knigge explains: ‘Summer tours can involve a lot of different styles of venue, one night we would be in a field, the next a tent. Before using Klang, we had to work really hard to get the mixes right for every space.

‘We would make adjustments at soundcheck, but then the audience would come in and change the acoustic, so inevitably I would have to spend the first couple of songs each night perfecting the mix, only to have it completely change the night after. It was pretty full on.’

A regular user of Klang with his other clients, Knigge had explained to the band that Klang would be the way forward for their IEM mixes, but when the opportunity to use DMI-Klang with their SD12 finally came around, there was no pre-production rehearsal. This could have meant that implementing the new mixes was a nerve-wracking experience, but Knigge was confident that everything would be fine, and jumped into his new immersive mixes without a second thought.

‘There were no production rehearsals this year, just a day of prep at Clair Global’s Berlin facility. Luckily, I had the multitrack recordings from last year, so I could make a rough 3D panned mix, just to give them a little more space in the mix,’ he says. ‘I just went for it during our first sound check. As soon as they started playing, their faces lifted to look straight at me. After the first song the band turned to me and said, “whatever you did, don’t touch anything”. And I thought, phew, that worked.’

Once the band were used to simple immersive panning, Knigge was able to perfect his mixes with height to ensure that levels remain consistent while keeping important elements, like vocals, at the forefront of the mix.

‘From a playing perspective, the best show was the first one because they were all excited about the change and they loved it,’ Knigge says. ‘The band joked that they no longer needed a soundcheck because nothing needed changing and, by the end of the tour, they actually started ditching soundchecks. We’ve never had such good monitor sound with these guys, and I’m very happy with the system.’

Previously, the band had lots of requests for Knigge to adjust levels during the show, but this is now a thing of the past. Using Klang’s spatial mixes enables him to place every element of the band’s sound in a way that ensures they have the clarity they need, without pushing up levels. Each component has the space it needs to be heard, including the all-important vocal, which could get lost with ten musicians on stage.

‘The need to keep pushing up the vocal during the show reduced a lot. With every band, there’s always one guy that needs himself louder during a show, but after adding Klang, I barely had questions during the show. I think I had one or two requests a night, which is unheard of for a band with ten musicians’

DMI-Klang supports 16 immersive in-ear mixes, with 64 channels available per mix, so it was a natural progression to offer the unused mixes to the crew. By the end of the tour, Knigge had control of ten musician mixes, a cue mix, a stage technician, three backliners and one guest mix that was used by the pyrotechnics technician when not in use for guests. The whole tour team benefitted from the enhanced sound of Klang’s immersive mixes, improving everyone’s experience, on stage and behind the scenes.

‘Backline mixes are usually done at the last minute, and they’re not really thought through because no one ever has time. Simply putting the crew’s existing mix into 3D has already improved things so much,’ Knigge concludes ‘Using Klang makes me really happy. The band loves it and my job is now much easier compared to how it was before. I am pretty sure that Klang is here to stay and will be our system of choice for many more tours.

More: www.klang.com