Long known for his vocals with Irish boy band Westlife, Shane Filan continued after the band’s breakup in 2012 with a successful solo career. The singer/songwriter’s first post-Westlife release was the 2013 You and Me CD on Capitol Records, and he followed up that album with his Right Here CD that debuted in late September of 2015.
Supporting his popular Right Here release, Filan and his band recently completed a successful 20-date tour through Ireland, England and Scotland with a set list that mixed old Westlife favorites with new material. The theater tour — which included prestigious addresses such as the 2,286-seat London Palladium — wrapped up on March 30 at the 2,000-seat Inverness Leisure Centre in Scotland. The production company was the Newark, U.K.-based Liz Hobbs Group, which acted as both promoter and production supplier for the tour.
The tour also reunited the husband and wife sound engineering team of Chris Pyne (FOH) and Becky Pell (monitors) — metaphorically linked by 100 meters of cable. The two had previously worked together with Kylie Minogue, Anastasia, Il Divo and the original Westlife before Pyne accepted a position with Martin Audio as its Asia Pacific product support engineer. In the meantime, Pyne had picked up the mantle with some of Filan’s solo dates in Southeast Asia, while his wife continued to work with Filan for the past six years.
At FOH
FOH engineer Pyne began his career as a musician in the 1970s. However, luck struck big time when Pyne scored a job as an assistant recording engineer at Paradise Studios in Sydney in the early 1980s. “This introduced me into the great days of Aussie rock that produced AC/DC, INXS, Midnight Oil and Icehouse,” Pyne recalls. “I ended up working for Jands (one of the top live production houses in Australia) as a junior system tech.” Although when pressed for details, he admits that the gig actually mostly entailed sweeping the floor, getting lunches and packing trucks. “I eventually got to mix some of Australia’s biggest rock acts in the very intense pub and club circuit, which was a great learning ground.”
Since then, Pyne has amassed lengthy roster of credits working live and in the studio with A-list artists including: Kylie Minogue, Anastacia, Dame Shirley Bassey, Il Divo, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bill Wyman (Rolling Stones), Olivia Newton John, Chaka Khan, Ray Charles, The Beijing Opera & Ballet Orchestra, Icehouse, The Bolshoi Ballet, The Producers (Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson, Lol Crème, Roger Daltrey), Air Supply, The London Symphony Orchestra, Jackie Chan, Sarah Brightman, Split Enz (Tim & Neil Finn), Rose Tattoo and Joan Rivers, as well as Westlife and Shane Filan. Pyne has also mixed at major festivals such as Glastonbury, Hyde Park London, Rock in Rio, The Big Day Out and the Roskilde Festival. Clearly, this is not his first rodeo.
Pyne started out in the analog days with a Midas XL4 as his console of choice, but “I’ve been a fan of DiGiCo since the start of the D5. For Shane, it was a SD8, and it varies with other events, but generally SD7 is my console of choice. I like the workflow and the layout, which I feel is quite intuitive.”
In terms of signal processing, he says he mostly uses “the internal gates and some comps on the DiGiCo and — depending on the tour budgets — the internal reverbs as well. I’m a bit old-school and prefer real outboard, but when it comes to plug-ins, I do like the Waves C6 multiband comp for vocals. It’s a handy tool for evening out any problem frequencies that occasional come up.”
On Shane Filan’s Right Here tour, Pyne is working entirely inside the box (not using any external outboard) but when the budget allows, he likes using an Avalon sp737 preamp on vocals and an Avalon AD2055 EQ across the mix as a master EQ. “Those and the TC Electronic 6000 reverb are my favorite outboard processors.”
House volume can be an issue, but Pyne keeps things under control. He notes that Filan’s show is a “mixture of acoustic and big pop ballads” and can “vary quite a lot, sitting between 85 dB and 105 dB, depending on the material.” Dynamic range, he adds, is a “very important” — but too often neglected —“tool in live music. So many acts are just loud and ‘death by kick drum’ and stay that way, which is fatiguing and boring.”
The System
For this theater tour of mostly 1,500- to 2,000-capacity venues, production scaled the rig accordingly but generally run 12 MLA Compact elements per side, either flown in the larger venues or stacked, along with four DSX subs on either side.
“The MLA Compact is a versatile system for this size of tour,” Pyne says. “We measure each venue, put the data into the software to calculate the angles and output of the system, and time align it; the whole thing is up and running inside an hour and a half.”
The speed, versatility and adaptability of MLA, which is not present in other systems, was perfectly demonstrated at St. David’s Hall in Cardiff, Wales, where a sudden cancellation of a nearby Wet Wet Wet concert resulted in a lot of unexpected walk-up sales.
“We suddenly had to open up new areas of the venue to accommodate the extra footfall,” reports production manager Rupert Doogan-Hobbs. There was certainly no need for a de-rig and physical system reconfiguration. “From a time-management point of view, it was fantastic. We could simply reconfigure the venue parameters electronically in the system.”
In fact, this was Doogan-Hobbs’s first experience with MLA technology. “When Chris suggested we demo the MLA Compact, there was initially a fear of the unknown, but right from the beginning it has been absolutely fantastic,” he confirmed.
As a representative for Martin Audio’s flagship P.A., Pyne has had both the chance to expose it to other engineers and demonstrate its multicellular control technology to the tour’s system tech, Andy Greenwood, but also beta test the new version of Martin Audio’s Display predictive software.
While Greenwood was extolling the speed with which he was able to familiarize himself with the optimizations, Pyne gave the new beta version of Display a thorough run-through. “This version is being tested in the field prior to a general release in the next couple of months, and there have been substantial upgrades,” he explained. “The system data has been reassessed for even greater accuracy. It also introduces Express Mode which should halve the time necessary to do the system calculations and process the system presets.”
Monitorworld
No stranger to the road, monitor engineer Becky Pell has been working in sound reinforcement for more than 20 years, and began her touring days as a monitor tech for the Black Crowes. Among the artists on her client list as monitor engineer include Aha, Il Divo, Muse, Westlife, Anastacia, Sarah Brightman, Mark Feehily and Natalie Imbruglia, as well as years as a monitor tech with Kylie Minogue, The Black Crowes and the Scottish rock band, Travis.
A longtime DiGiCo user, on this tour Pell was providing stereo IEM mixes for Shane Filan and four band members as well as tech mixes for the crew on a SD10 console. “Of course, DiGiCo’s SD7 is the Rolls-Royce, but I’m happy with any DiGiCo desk,” Pell explains. “I find DiGiCo consoles to be incredibly intuitive and easy to get around, which means I can watch Shane and the band as much as possible rather than peering down at the desk looking for things! I love their versatility, and they sound great.”
Like Pyne, when considering signal processing, plug-ins aren’t necessarily essential. “I’m not a big fan of the plug-in culture,” she explains. “I think there’s a real temptation — especially among newer engineers — to use all the toys just because they are there. Besides, the DiGiCo generally has what I need on-board. I like the multi-band compression DiGiCos offer, and the onboard reverbs are pretty good. If budget, allows I do like a TC 6000 reverb, but that’s about it. I’d only add plug-ins if they were really needed, and in my experience, getting the basics sorted (right mic, right placement, good gain structure, judicious EQ) resolves most things.”
The Vocal Chain
Pell is constantly looking into ways to improve the vocal chain. “We’ve been experimenting on this tour between Shane’s old faithful Shure Beta 58A and the new DPA d:facto II. He likes the warmth of the 58 and the cut of the DPA, so we’ve been playing around with both.”
However, with Filan, getting a great vocal sound literally comes down to the basics. “It’s very simple — it really is all about the gain and EQ with him. He’s very consistent and has a big voice, he likes lots of his vocal in his ears, but he doesn’t like compression. So that means getting the balance of foundations like sensitivity on the mic and IEMs spot-on, and EQ-ing the mic so it cuts through nicely while retaining fullness and warmth.”
The entire band is on in-ears, with the players who need wireless using Sennheiser 2000 series and the hardwired guys on the German-based Fischer Amps beltpacks. According to Pell, this keeps the stage SPLs “reasonably vibe-y, but nothing too wild.”
The Shane Filan tour may have just wrapped, but there’s no rest ahead for Pell. “I’ve been working with Take That and Gary Barlow since October (covering for Steve Lutley while he’s out with ELO), so that’s my current gig. Come June, I’ll be heading up monitors on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury again, and I’m looking forward to that.”
The Wrapup
Clearly the Martin Audio MLA compact was the right choice for this tour. “Using the MLA technology is quite a revelation in the difficult rooms, being able to control reflection and overall coverage SPL so accurately,” Pyne concludes, “and I like knowing that what you’re doing at the FOH mix position is being translated to the audience at all positions in the venue in the same manner.”
Shane Filan Right Here Tour
CREW
Sound Company: Liz Hobbs Group (Newark U.K.)
FOH Engineer: Chris Pyne
Monitor Engineer: Becky Pell
System Tech: Andy Greenwood
Monitor Tech: Jason Thomas
Production Manager: Rupert Doogan-Hobbs
SYSTEM
Main P.A.: (24) Martin Audio MLA Compact elements (12 per side)
Subwoofers: (8) DSX subs (four per side)
FOH GEAR
FOH Console: DiGiCo SD8
System Software: Martin Audio Display
MONITOR GEAR
Monitor Console: DiGiCo SD10
Vocal Mics: Shure Beta 58A, DPA d:facto II
IEMs: Sennheiser 2000 wireless; Fischer Amps (hard wired)
