DUNDALK, Ireland – Muse’s longtime FOH engineer, Marc Carolan, has been scaling down his analog outboard gear this year in favor of digital while on tour with Snow Patrol using Fourier Audio’s transform.engine. The band performed a string of North American dates in March and April and will head to Europe for more shows in June and July.
More details from Fourier Audio (www.fourieraudio.com):
Although Marc Carolan has become well known for carrying several racks of analog outboard gear when touring as the front-of-house mixer for Snow Patrol and Muse, he is just as likely to apply some of his favorite plugins hosted on Fourier Audio’s transform.engine. But while he has long simply chosen the processing tool that fits the application — whether it’s analog or digital – this summer, using Fourier’s platform, he plans to push the limits of what he’s previously been able to do in the digital domain.
Carolan, who has been working in live and studio sound for over 25 years, also including with The Cure, Italian superstar Cremonini, and many others, follows a simple principle when selecting what signal processing to apply to a sound source. “It has always been about the tool that fits, the tool that works. I’m quite agnostic about it,” he says.
On Snow Patrol’s current tour, which heads to Europe in June and July following a string of North American dates in March and April, his processing agnosticism allowed him to lean more heavily on his Fourier transform.engine and plugins from the likes of oeksound, Plugin Alliance, Softube and Solid State Logic. “I was able to leave two racks behind without having a panic attack, because there’s a lot of great plugins that can fill in those analog outboard gaps,” he comments.
Ordinarily, Skan PA Hire, a Clair Global company, would have sent Carolan to the States with four racks stacked with analog gear for this Snow Patrol tour. “For the first time in a long time we were doing theaters in the US, and my arena footprint was not welcome,” he laughs. But, having toured for so long with the transform.engine and having explored its performance as applied to his clients’ typical input sources, he says, he was completely familiar with what his options were to the analog outboard equipment that stayed in Skan’s warehouse this time around. Further, he had complete confidence in the Fourier Audio platform’s reliability. “So when the time came, it was a very easy swap,” he says.
This summer, I’ve got three tours out – Snow Patrol, Muse, and a big Italian artist named Cesare Cremonini – and transform is a big part of that picture.” For those summer tours, Carolan intends to take the Broadway and West End theater model, where a sound designer sets up and programs a show but isn’t necessarily the operator behind the mixing console every night, and apply it to touring rock band shows. “All three tours are happening at the same time. I finally convinced everyone that, if you program it correctly and pay due attention, you could put an operator on sound,” he says, which is also a similar model to lighting design, both on the road and in the theater. “The transform platform, with its stability and reliability, has helped me with that plan.”
Carolan will work on some of the shows, he says, but logistics make it impossible for some dates: “For instance, I’m headlining at San Siro Stadium in Italy with Cremonini, Muse are headlining a big festival in France, and Snow Patrol are headlining a stadium in Ireland, all on the same night. But they will all use my show files.”
The introduction of a Cuelist function in transform.engine’s software update has opened additional possibilities for Carolan on the platform, he shares. “What I’ve now been able to do is build a show on my transform.engine that’s got different levels for how much outboard I have. I can program the show as if I have no outboard, and I can zoom in or out according to what the tour budget is. The new Cuelist has been amazing for that. And it’s really clever how simply they’ve done it, and how uncomplicated and how easy it is.”
Carolan is in a position to compare transform.engine to other plugin hosting platforms, having tried several. “What the transform platform allows me to do is to pick and choose the best of the best. For instance, I’m using quite a lot of SSL plugins, but they are the SSL versions,” he says, not third-party emulations. He has also long favored Softube’s lineup of plugins: “They do a lot of very good emulations and meticulously modeled the Tube Tech stuff. Another excellent emulation is the Maag EQ, available from Plugin Alliance.”
Carolan’s confidence in the Fourier Audio platform stems in no small part from the fact that he began using it while it was still in the alpha stage of development. When first supplied with the package, Carolan, whose main clients typically play some of the world’s largest arenas and stadiums, immediately incorporated it into his workflow. “It’s not really what they intended. I said, ‘But it works, so let’s do it.’ What was amazing in those days was that Henry, Pete, and the Fourier guys would literally sit behind me and code – and then I’d use it in the show!”
His long experience with transform means that he hardly thinks about the difference between analog and digital. “I’m quite comfortable about allowing it to just be an extension of my hardware,” Carolan explains. “You tweak this, you tweak that, as if it were outboard. I’ll focus on, say, a reverb or a delay or an EQ, and everything that’s out of that focus is just dumb outboard. That’s wonderfully freeing. One of the great joys is having things like Fab Filter Q3 right there and knowing that if I want to, I can automate 20 bands of that. But do I want to? With all of these tools, it’s wonderful to just find out what’s the best application, musically.”
For details on Snow Patrol’s upcoming European tour stops, visit www.snowpatrol.com. Skan PA Hire can be found online at www.skanpa.co.uk.
