Nelson was also sound mixing his long-time charge Placebo on the same bill. "The way I planned it with both the Cure and Placebo was in order to avoid any worries about the mic levels, I put a stage box on the revolve and all the mics and satellite feeds went straight to the box."
For Placebo, Nelson simply recalled the last show he had recorded on the Venue - down in South America. "We had a brief line check so I knew everything was in the ballpark and that it will be within 10% of the tolerance band; that way you avoid the 15 seconds of sheer terror you can experience when a show starts."
The dynamic with the Cure was entirely different. With Matt West on monitors, the sound engineers had the benefit of three days' production rehearsals at Stanbridge Studios, mixing tracks for Robert Smith and taking full advantage of the Venue's Pro Tools support. "He knows exactly what he wants - which is a real compliment," says Nelson. "I recorded all the rehearsals straight to stereo and he took a multitrack from the monitor desk and mixed the songs how he wanted to hear them and we managed to come up with a middle ground."
Initially the mix was too clean and Smith requested it to be 'garaged' up. "So I pushed the overheads and made the guitar a bit more edgy, using the old Pultec EQ Pro Tools plug-in, removing one of the frequency settings to make it sound more trashy," says Nelson. The engineer also used the TL Space convolution reverb Pro Tools plug-in to end up with the ideal show mix."The fact that I had a couple of days of rehearsals with Robert saved my life at Live8," he admits.
The event was supported by Dispatch SA/Best Audio, French distributors for the Digidesign Venue.
(Lee Baldock)
