Sequencing apart, this is a very analogue sounding band, real guitars, keys, drums and percussion, yet on the outside their show embraces some of the very latest technology.
Lighting
These are never easy shows to light, the style demanding that you not so much light the artist, as the room. Juan Morandi has strong things to say about the subject: "The fact is you can’t tour a music production at this level with anything original unless you have a lot of money. This is a front and back truss situation with extremely boring moving lights." Sorry? "Who’s not seen a rotating gobo?" Fair enough. "We go from 80ft to 20ft wide stages, and you have little choice but to compromise."
That said he makes much of his lights from LSD Fourth Phase: Cyberlights and PC Beams distributed at every height and vantage point make for a full canvas, which is busy enough to always engage the eye. But Morandi has a stranger in his rig - a pair of Barco ELMs fitted with High End Catalyst control platforms developed by Wynne Willson Gottelier (WWG). Barely months out of launch mode, Morandi has a beta version: "I came across Richard Bleasdale in an Internet chat room some time ago when I was looking for information on video and software." Bleasdale, for those who don’t know, is the software genius who developed SAM Show Control (as used for the Millennium Dome show) and the third element to WWG’s brainchild. And while we’re on the subject of antecedents, Morandi is an LD who divides his time between concert tours, theatre and opera, most recently lighting Don Pasquale for Jonathan Miller.
"I have a black projection screen across the back which works really well for the B&W images, real blacks and very high contrast. The Catalyst is for adjustments - shape, size, mask - things that normally can take a lot of time." Besides understating the image manipulation, Morandi is at pains to point out he does all this himself: "That’s one of the beauties of the system - I don’t need a video man and a PPU and all the extra expense that entails. I’ve loaded After FX and Photoshop onto the G4 system and because all the images and applications live together, it’s easy to flip in and out when programming."
He controls both the lighting and all the Catalyst cues from a solitary Wholehog II, DMX running to a Hog Widget which translates to USB and thence to the Mac G4: "It’s almost instantaneous, maybe less than a tenth of a second delay, so effectively it’s another light I control. There are limitations - if you want to do something like a zoom in/out as part of a fast chase, you end up bouncing up against the speed of the processor. The trick is not to load too much onto one cue and to build a stack of preparatory cues. It’s essentially movie playback; if you don’t know about movies, how to edit for example, you’ll find it a bit difficult. It’s great for experimental work - but it’s only as good as what you put into it." A telling endorsement, the very fact that you can input your own imagery at all, and indeed manipulate that imagery in the Catalyst system, seems to me to set it apart. Maybe that explains Morandi’s rather jaundiced comments about moving lights.
Sound
Mark Kennedy mixes without the aid of a safety net, dangling from a Midas Heritage 3000 beneath a rather large Nexo Alpha from SSE Hire. "I’ve got 46 inputs, eight sequencing, all recorded years ago and all completely different; even the bass drum sounds vary enormously." He has gates on the toms and kick, and Neve 9098s for backing vocals and the bass. "I use as little as possible: unless it sounds considerably better through a compressor, I always prefe
