Midnight Oil front man Peter Garrett recently finished a solo tour of Australia in support of his new album A Version of Now. For the east coast shows JPJ Audio supplied a FOH control and monitor set up as well as some extra wedges.
FOH Engineer was Colin Ellis, who mixed for Midnight Oil in the ‘90s. “I believe that Peter Garrett wanted me to do the tour,” he said. “We had production rehearsals in Sydney including a small show for friends and family. For the tour, we decided to use in house PAs, which worked alright. However, none of the systems were amazing and it was the first time in many years that I used non line array systems!”
At Canberra Theatre, Garrett’s home crowd, there was concern that the in house PA system may not give enough onstage so Ellis decided to add a couple of L-Acoustics Arcs and a couple of L-Acoustics subs a side.
“We rang Jim Straw at JPJ, who is always helpful, and fortunately the truck was coming through Sydney so the extra gear could be picked up,” said Ellis, who ran a Venue Profile console accompanied by a pair of Rokit 5 powered monitors to assist with line checks.
“I have to keep grabbing the EQ knob to re-EQ his voice when he talks and vice versa,” the FOH Engineer explained. “It’s quite annoying and really it’s a proximity thing with the Shure SM58 microphone. Some of it can be fixed by C4 multiband compressors. When he speaks between songs he has a very strong midrange in his voice – I think it’s the politician coming out of him! I think it can be addressed by the new Shure KSM8 Dualdyne vocal microphone but we haven’t any in the country yet. If Midnight Oil happens next year and if I’m doing it, I’ll make a bunch of changes including these new microphones and a switch to the Venue S6L console.”
Colin used several Waves plugins including NLS Non-Linear Summer for console emulation, C4 Multiband Compressors, a sonic maximiser on the bass and a couple of other places, Puigchild compressors, V-Comp Neve style EQ, and Q10 Equalizer for parametric EQ.
Paul Kennedy ran monitors from an Avid Venue SC48. “Kenno is such a good operator, they were all happy as Larry throughout the tour,” reported Ellis.