It is 20 years since Mike Scott put his first Waterboys line-up together and Madden has worked with them for the last six, with many of his show recordings appearing on the band's latest Karma To Burn live CD. Karma To Burn also provided the name for their latest 10-day UK theatre tour, which completed this month.
Chris also handles the FOH mix for Charlotte Church and Gabrielle - but it was Liverpool band the La's that gave him his intro to Venue, when sound engineer Pab Boothroyd extolled its virtues before handing over the FOH position to Madden, and assigning his desk to higher duties with Paul McCartney. "Pab called me and asked if I wanted to take over the tour. He had strongly recommended the desk, and although I couldn't use it on the final dates, by then I had met (Digidesign's) Mike Case . . . and was eager to use it with the Waterboys."
The sound engineer already had widespread experience on other consolidated digital desks (and had previously worked as a manufacturer's demonstrator). In the studio world he had dabbled with Digidesign's proprietary Pro Tools. "And so my Venue training was more about the interface with Pro Tools and learning Pro Tools techniques . . . standing in front of it and listening," he explains. With Pro Tools LE loaded onto his laptop "it became a case of importing the WAV files from a previous 24-track recording and bussing it down to the FireWire card which delivers 18 tracks of audio."
Thus using Venue's Pro Tools LE option to exploit the HD recording options, Madden has produced CD-Rs of every Waterboys show - purely for review purposes, using a couple of ambient mics to pick up the audience atmosphere. Playing back through Concert Sound's HK Audio Cohedra line array system Madden is particularly impressed with the dynamics inherent to Venue, the consistency of the classic plug-in emulations and D-Show's ease of use.
"Although technically we had four days of production rehearsals - and Concert Sound sent down a full monitor system so the band had the same set-up as on tour - I could only commit one full day in man hours and had to rely on picking up Venue on the fly - which was a doddle."
(Lee Baldock)
