While younger audiences will know Zimmer for his many super hero movie scores, most recently Batman V Superman, he has never-the-less inhabited our ears since the early eighties. First gaining attention, in the UK at least, for his work on My beautiful Laundrette, Zimmer has never neglected the human condition: Rainman, Thelma and Louise and more recently Twelve Years a Slave all pay testament to his sensitivity and diversity. To make possible a live rendition of such variety has seen Zimmer assemble an equally diverse team of technical talent.
Nathaniel Kunkel, a Grammy and Emmy Award-winning producer, sound engineer and 5:1 surround mix specialist has had a long association with Zimmer, "but this is a totally different animal," he said with a measure of understatement. His role is nominally sound designer for the tour, a world away from the controlled environs of the studio.
Kunkel engaged the services of Britannia Row Productions after he supervised and mixed Zimmer's highly acclaimed exploratory outing at London's Hammersmith Apollo last year. "Since then I have been the main liaison between the Hans team and Lez (Dwight) at Brit Row in relation to staffing decisions and system specification approvals. I was also responsible for the architecture of the show control, capture, and sync setup that we employ in the show," he explains.
"Nathaniel is both sound designer and my guide," says live sound mixer Colin Pink, unfolding the current division of labour. "One challenge on this show was learning to identify all the different sources - where is that keyboard part coming from? Now, while I'm focused on managing the mix, he is thinking about how it sounds everywhere else. With his background working with Hans he has a good sense of how it should be experienced. To achieve that he spends a lot of time with Sergiy Zhytnikov, Brit Row's system tech."
Over three months the tour visits many of the major arena venues of Europe. "By the time I show up there is a great sounding system at my disposal and he continues to work in concert with Colin (Pink) and myself throughout the show improving the tuning until we all agree that we have achieved the best we can," says Kunkel.
Britrow crew chief and orchestra monitor mixer Dee Miller, more normally found at the controls for Robert Plant, describes this complex audio set-up. "The system is two full trucks of equipment. We have typical L-Acoustics K1/K2 mains and side hangs as you'd expect in an arena, plus flown K Subs and twenty-one SB28 subs and fills on the floor. Then out at the back of the room we fly a further eight K2 a side for a surround system. The input count is enormous, 24 musicians in the orchestra, 24 choir, plus 23 in the band plus Hans.
"We have 180 inputs for the monitor system, I'm mixing orchestra and choir on a Digico SD8 (ten stereo mixes each), Maurizio Gennari is mixing the band (27 stereo mixes to IEMs), while Colin out front has in excess of 230 channels of input when you add in the special effects and other tracks; both use an SD7.
"That said, most of it is live, even the special effects. We have rotating orchestras to contend with, they change every time we move territory, and we have some principal performers who guest with the core band, Johnny Marr at the UK shows for example. All in all, it's a big complex presentation."
(Jim Evans)
