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Keep Honing It

Tony Bennett's 85th Birthday was this month. Happy Birthday, Tony.

 

I had the distinct honor of mixing Tony Bennett during his MTV Unplugged success. He was happy to have young people discover his music, while their parents were rediscovering it. Prior to joining him, tour manager Vance Anderson would do it all – hotels and travel, advance and backline, run sound and call lights and followspots. When I got his call, out of the blue, Anderson said that Tony wanted to go to a two-man crew, and he remembered me from a one-off the year before.

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Delicate Tames Sheds for Selena Gomez with MLA

Brennan Houser, Jason Brandt, Javier Alcaraz and Jason Moore

Supporting her new Hollywood Records album When the Sun Goes Down, Selena Gomez is playing two-dozen North American concerts through September. Javier Alcaraz from Delicate Productions' South San Francisco office, now in its second year, is providing a brand new Martin Audio Multi-cellular Loudspeaker Array (MLA) system that is proving valuable for taming the outdoor venues on their itinerary.

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Soundcos Bring Top Gear to Glastonbury 2011

Teams of sound engineers converged at Glasto 2011 armed with the latest technology to ensure that, if the trampled grounds were remembered as wet and muddy, the audio quality would be anything but. The festival, which runs the last weekend of June, was sold out within hours of when tickets went on sale last October, months before Coldplay, Beyoncé and U2 were confirmed as headliners at the festival's main Pyramid stage.

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Soundcraft Plugin and Virtual Sound Check Solution

The auther at Britt Festival FOH with his Soundcraft-RME-Waves solution

I've been using my Soundcraft Vi6 as my FOH console for several years in festival situations because of its ease of use mixing on the fly and getting guest engineers up and running quickly. There were a couple of additional features, however, that I wanted to implement on my console. The first was the ability to record to 48 tracks and bring them back into the console to create a virtual sound check, and the other was to have the ability to use plugins.

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Josh Groban On Tour

Maryland Sound, Mickey Beck and Will Miller Deliver "Straight to You"

Touring to support his fifth studio recording, the Rick Rubin-produced Illuminations, singer Josh Groban toured many North American markets this summer, returning to Europe for the remainder of the year. The "Straight to You Tour," named after a track on Illuminations, is playing indoor arenas.

 

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Earthworks SR40V Condenser Vocal Mic

In the last few years, Milford, NH-based Earthworks Inc. has produced several products that have resulted in a transformation of the company's image within the audio engineering community. Earthworks originally built its reputation on its impeccable omnidirectional measurement microphones, and subsequently ventured into the studio recording market with their high definition omni and cardioid small diaphragm music microphones.

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Countryman Type 10 and Type 10S Active Direct Box

My first Countryman DIs were the ones I loaded into the workbox for my first tour in 1985 with Crystal Gayle: brand new black anodized Countryman Type 85 direct boxes, which have since become a ubiquitous staple in live sound and asked for by brand – the ‘Scotch Tape' of DIs. I'm sure most of you have used them.

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Superglue Saga, Part 1: The Game’s Afoot

Okay, some of you remember reading the story of my nightmare titled “Nightmare on Murphy Street – Denver Edition” (FOH, Oct. 2007) and enjoyed reading about life on the road when Mr. Murphy is around. Well, there are other times when Mr. Murphy (I always use the title, as you never know when he may be taking notes) uses the hands of others to make you take a moment of pause and reflection. Such is the case here.

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