‘From the age of 14, I had a keen interest in music equipment,’ says James Towler, FOH and studio engineer for Steve Winwood. ‘But after school I became a financial consultant and wound up doing offshore investments. Then I met some musicians in London, and one happened to be Steve Winwood’s music director. I fixed some things for him, and he asked if I had ever considered being a keyboard technician. I said, “no but I’ll do it…”’
Towler became Winwood’s keyboard tech in 1997, and in 2003 became his monitor engineer. He built, managed, and engineered in Winwood’s Cheltenham studio, and he mixes FOH for live shows. ‘I am 100 per cent Steve Winwood all the time,’ he says. Even so, he has found time to produce two albums for John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, and he works with a few bands in Gloucester.
For a 2016 tour with Steely Dan, Towler recommended mixing monitors with the PreSonus StudioLive RM32AI rack-mount digital mixer and recording with Studio One 3 Professional. ‘I’ve been a fan of PreSonus since 2003, when I bought the DigiMax,’ he says. ‘I ran monitors and did the recording feeds using 32 channels of DigiMax, with limiters, running to hard-disk recorders. So I know and like the sound of PreSonus preamps.’
Towler bought a RM32AI at launch and added the Dante option card when that came out. ‘For this tour, I have outboard mic preamps with Dante options, and I split the signal from there,’ he explains. ‘One split goes to the FOH desk and the other goes to the RM32AI, which consolidates the feeds for five monitor mixes onstage. At FOH, I have a Mac Mini and an interface with a Dante card, and I take the streams into Studio One for multitracking.’
Winwood mixes his own monitors but not while playing: ‘We tried mixing monitors with iPads onstage but Steve was trying to jab at the iPad while playing with both hands and feet and singing,’ Towler says. ‘Now, he sets up his monitor mix at soundcheck, and I’ve got a guy onstage with an iPad to assist the musicians from there. With UC Surface, I control the RM32AI from front-of-house. The whole band is on in-ears, and I tweak the feeds with the RM32AI’s Fat Channel EQ and compression. Steve has them in both ears, so I put a touch of RM32AI reverb on his mix to bring it out of his head a bit.
Although Towler uses the RM32AI for monitors, it also provides emergency backup preamps: ‘I had an outboard preamp go out because of a storm at an outdoor gig, and all we had to do was change to the inputs from the RM32AI and reassign the Dante feeds,’ he recalls.
‘Steve has remarked on how much better it sounds,’ he adds. ‘So has Paul Booth, the sax player. The drummer, Richard Bailey, said that for the first time when wearing in-ears, it feels like he’s playing his drum kit again.’
Towler records every set with Studio One 3 Professional. ‘I have not had one issue with it,’ he reports. ‘It has been completely stable; it works seamlessly. I started getting interested with version 3. The difference was the Smart tool. With that, I after just 30 minutes of messing around, I could edit at least as fast as I could in Pro Tools.
‘I found that the options within the Smart tool were better than in Pro Tools,’ he continues. ‘I’ve got macros set up so I can normalise a file and drop it down to 14dB at the click of a button and start applying plug-ins.’
Rather than use UC Surface’s Smaart audio analysis, Towler created a solution using Studio One: ‘I set up the solo at the FOH desk so that when I solo, I have the FFT up in Studio One on every channel,’ he explains. ‘I can click to any channel to see what frequencies are there. I’ve also got a reference mic, and when I solo that, its feed is up on the screen. It’s great for dealing with feedback issues or anything like that.
‘It takes a bit of thinking to figure out all the things you can do with Studio One, but once you’ve got it, there are many cooler ways that you can work than what you’re used to with other DAWs,’ Towler insists. ‘Add to that the way Melodyne integrates into Studio One, and why would you ever want to use another DAW?’
Focusrite on stage and studio
A common thread between Winwood’s studio and stage setups is a comprehensive system of Focusrite RedNet Dante-networked audio converters and interfaces.
‘The first time I saw RedNet was at a demo when the Slate Raven console was announced in London,’ Towler recalls. I was waiting in the queue, and there was an area with a RedNet rack directly opposite the console. I got a demo set up for me up at Wincraft studios, and we immediately started buying RedNet units.’
Towler’s set-up includes two RedNet 2 16-channel remote-controlled analogue interfaces; three RedNet D16 AES 16-channel AES3 I/O for Dante audio networks; two RedNet 5 32-channel Pro Tools HD/Dante Network Bridge; three RedNet MP8R eight-channel Mic Pre and A/D converters; and four RedNet PCIe Cards and a Rednet 3. He uses identical RedNet system configurations in the studio and on the road. However, for this tour, he made some slight modifications based on in his signal flow.
‘I changed the system a little for this tour because we don’t have a monitor engineer per se,’ he explains. ‘I control it all from front-of-house, so I built two racks with the mic preamps to go on stage behind the musicians –there are literally no stageboxes. Being able to use the RedNet units to control Steve’s vocals from front-of-house, I’m not even really pushing or driving the preamps and I am still able to get his vocal to sit above the mix without any effort. Before we went out on tour, we were in the studio testing the racks – I plugged into the MP8R and, I swear, I’ve never heard a 57 sound so good.
‘The musicians on the tour are having a better time now since I have moved to RedNet compared to our last system just because the clarity of the music and the mix that is coming through – there’s much less muddiness,’ Towler reports. ‘I also produced the last PiL album, What the World Needs Now…, which was 100 per cent RedNet,. I’m really enjoying the MP8Rs on this Winwood Tour – they sound great, are very detailed and perform well in the heat.’
