From being singer and rhythm guitarist for Hootie & the Blowfish, Darius Rucker has moved to the top of the country music charts and has recently released a fourth studio album, Southern Style.
‘We were once a small company, just starting out, and one of the bands we were working with then was Hootie & The Blowfish,’ recalls Jason Farah, co-founder and co-owner of North Carolina-based Special Event Services (SES). Presently, he is the sound reinforcement provider for the Southern Style tour, and counts Joe Bonamassa and Sam Smith among his other clients.
SES went on the road with the band in the wake of its 1994 major-label debut, Cracked Rear View, and by 2000 it was touring exclusively with an SES L-Acoustics V-Dosc system. ‘They told us, we were there for them in the beginning, and now they’re on a major label, they were taking you with us,’’ Farah says. ‘They took us to national prominence and we’ve been with Darius since.’
That bond still stands, and the Darius Rucker Band is out on tour with SES’ newly acquired L-Acoustics K1 system, using a split system of eight K1 speakers atop eight K2 speakers per side, plus eight SB28 subs per side groundstacked below. A dozen ARCS enclosures are used as needed for ancillary fills, and six dV-Dosc serve as lip fills for the stage, all powered by 24 LA8 amplified controllers housed in eight LA-Raks.
‘We get such a powerful throw out of this system, which is exactly what we need to reach the lawns for these shed shows, and the 10° inter-element angle on those K2s gives us punch in the close field, which used to be a challenge,’ explains Bryan Kiger, systems engineer for SES on the Southern Style tour. ‘This configuration gives us a nice wide coverage, which is perfect for these kinds of venues.’
‘The entire system sounds great,’ says Farah. ‘I’m partial to the K2s, which excel as a close-field speaker – they sound like you’re listening to a stereo system. The overall K1 system is fabulous. You plug it in and it works. LA Network Manager is solid – the base EQ-voicing presets in the amplifiers have been constantly refined, and, now, when you turn it on, you immediately hear that signature L-Acoustics sound: silky through the highs and warm in the middle, with plenty of strong, clear bass. It’s such a great match with Darius’ voice. And we’re getting consistent results from venue to venue.’
Kiger is a veteran of L-Acoustics on tour – he was SES’ V-Dosc system tech on the road with Coldplay for seven years starting in 2001. ‘The K1 is great-sounding right out of the box,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t take a lot of EQ to get it to where you want it. Also, the rigging for the box is phenomenal. We can hang the system in ten minutes with just a few people. It’s a PA that you can hand to an engineer and turn on, and with just a little attention to zone-level control and timing, you’re ready to start the show. The K1 is a great tool that lets me get at the sound – it doesn’t fight me. We’re mixing the show through a vintage Midas XL4 console, and the combination of the finest analog console ever made with the finest speaker system built is true sonic beauty.’
