NEW YORK – Australian band Jet hit the road in America to support the group's latest album, Shaka Rock. Manning the controls at front of house was veteran mixer Kyle Chirnside, with Will Burston at the monitor desk. The group carried its own front of house console, a Midas PRO6 live audio system supplied by Big Mo Pro, Parsippany, N.J.
"I've been using the PRO6 for two years now. It's my console of choice," said Chirnside. "In fact, we did the first few shows on this tour without it, and I can tell you, it makes a huge difference. With the digital snake system and on-board processing, the PRO6 really makes everything easier, and helps us get the most out the house rigs we encounter."
Jet also considered doing a live album, so all shows on the tour were recorded. For that task, Chirnside opted for the Klark Teknik DN9696 high resolution audio recorder. Designed to integrate seamlessly with Midas digital consoles, the DN9696 is a 5 RU rack-mount device offering 96 tracks of recording at 96 kHz/24-bit resolution.
"The 9696 has been flawless for us," said Chirnside. "We're taking the channel outputs right after the preamps via fiber, pre-fader, with no processing. The recorder sits in monitor world, so Will Burston is watching it during the show. But really, once you've got your trim set, all you have to do is hit Record and let it go. We're using a total of 36 channels, including 5 channels of ambient miking. Channel gain has basically stayed the same since the first day we started recording, so capturing and storing each performance is practically automatic."
On the PRO6, Chirnside uses the Midas POPulation Groups and VCAs to provide access to all elements of his mix. Jet is a classic five-piece rock band, with two guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, with all five members contributing vocals. Chirnside dedicates five of the PRO6's six POP Groups to each band member, with the sixth Group carrying all the vocals. "That way, I can pull up any individual with one button-push, and I still have all my VCAs available as separate submixes," he said.
The VCAs provide a greater level of detail, each carrying natural instrument groupings. The drum kit is split across three VCAs, with kick drum, snare and hi-hat comprising one group, toms another, and cymbals a third. Similarly, there are VCAs for keyboards, lead vocals (clean and "dirty"), backing vocals and bass. Various reverbs occupy three more slots.
On the PRO6, the extensive onboard DSP effects can be set up in a virtual rack for easy access. "The effects sound so good, we don't carry any outboard gear at all," Chirnside said. "I'm using three reverbs – one for snare, another for tom, and one for vocals. They're all done off the internal DN780 engine. I also run a delay, and the rest of my effects are stereo 3-band compressors, which gives me a little extra frequency compression I can call on if I need it, primarily on the main vocalists."
Jet's opening act, the Crash Kings, were also mixed on the PRO6, though local openers are usually mixed by local engineers on the house console. To accommodate this, Chirnside used the Area B feature to carry the audio from the console, plus a stereo feed for walking-in music fed from an iPod. This allowed the left side of the console (Area A) to be dedicated to Jet and Crash Kings settings, with seamless changeover between acts.
Chirnside, an early PRO6 adopter who has been using the Midas digital for two full years now, said it's well-suited for tours not traveling with their own PA. "I'll tell you, from using house desks on the first few shows of this tour to when we picked up the PRO6, it makes a huge difference," he said. "It really livens up the sound of these old house rigs. In virtually every venue we've played, the house engineer is amazed at how good their system sounds when it's played through this console."
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