Monitor Engineer.

It’s rather good.

Royal Albert Hall, London, UK. June 2019

Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia. August 2019

Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. August 2019

Plenary Theatre, Melbourne, Australia. August 2019

I have spent much of 2019 working with Paul Young and his band as monitor engineer. A combination of touring and festivals in the UK and Europe. A compact touring package utilised a Digico SD9 and Sennheiser G3 in ear monitors.

We concluded with  a short tour around UK arenas joining Cher on her Here We Go Again tour. I won the bigger desk raffle for this run,

Actually we finished at Butlin’s Minehead but let’s be honest, supporting Cher sounds better.

Back to the world of fields.

I was the house monitor engineer for Lytham Festival in 2018.

I was the video systems engineer for Lytham Festival in 2019.

I’ll probably be looking after the second burger van to the right of the stage in 2020. (Edit 27 August 2020: Not laughing now!)

https://www.sseaudiogroup.com/News/wigwam-hire-returns-to-lytham-festival

Summer 2018 was spent mostly as monitor engineer for Hacienda Classical. Orchestra, DJs, vocalists, choir, special guests and Bez.

We took a package of over 150 inputs and around 32 stereo mixes into festivals and venues around the UK.  A Digico SD7 at each end (FOH and monitors) handled the job effortlessly. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, we used Digico 32 bit mic pre-amp cards on the orchestral inputs. In answer to your question, yes, they do sound good. 

Back out with Hacienda Classical in 2019.

October 2018 brought me the honour of working as monitor engineer for the legendary Duane Eddy celebrating his 80th birthday with some UK shows. With the Richard Hawley band and special guests Imelda May, Albert Lee and Bruce Welch making guest appearances the shows were a musical masterclass. Lovely people, all excellent musicians.

FOH engineer was Francoise Le Moignan.

Wigwam Acoustics supplied Digico desks, RF and monitors.

A couple of last minute arena shows for Mariah Carey to finish the year off nicely!

Vision mixing and racking cameras for live imag screens on Mariah’s only UK dates this year at London’s O2 Arena and Manchester Arena.

Flown LED Imag screens were Infiled ER 5.9mm.

Just completed Collabro’s 2017 Home Tour. Dual role as LED Screen Tech and Audio & Video playback. 32sqm of LED screen in various configurations to suit the differing venues. All playback was run off a combination of Apple Mac Pro towers for video and a pair of Mac Minis for audio. All computers running Qlab.

All video equipment was supplied by Live Event Productions.

Just completed the Alfie Boe and Michael Ball tour around the  country houses of the UK. Working as Vision Mixer/Director/Crew Boss for newly formed Live Event Productions, this was an opportunity to put the Roe MC7 LED panels through their paces. I have to say, I’m very impressed. After many years of fighting to get good pictures onto LED screens these panels are the first ones where what leaves the vision switcher matches perfectly on the screen. The colour reproduction is excellent. I was able to confidently rack the cameras without having to compensate for what the screen processing and panels were doing. This led to consistently great pictures night after night, regardless of the light conditions.

Information for the bored:

Vision Mixer:

• Panasonic AV-HS410 Live Switcher

Cameras:

• 3 Sony HXC-100 with Triax and CCU’s for racking.
• 2 Go Pro Hero 5’s

Screens:

• 30m² Roe MC-7H in portrait format.

I spent August 2012, 2013 & 2014 looking after the on site AV requirements for the BBC at their Edinburgh Festival site at Potterrow.

The main venue (blue tent) had 2 stacked projectors fed from a Kramer switcher. In the outdoor area a 15sqm LED screen provided information for visitors, recorded material and live relays from across the site. I also provided my own bespoke ticker software for easily updated messaging on the screen. The smaller, bar area (pink tent) contained 2 plasma screens with local and remote input facilities.

A Broadcast Pix system was used as the main switch and for keying and playback purposes. A Behringer X32 mixer was programmed with preset scenes to accommodate the local audio routing to the venue areas and green room, production office, radio OB’s and studio.

I designed the AV distribution between all the different zones, making use of a cat5 based system to allow video and audio to be routed from any location, to any location across the site. This allowed a level of versatility essential when dealing with multiple varied productions every single day.

In 2013, I provided public wifi access using Ubiquiti software and access points.