Download a pdf - FOH Online

The holiday season has enough stresses
on its own without adding a two-week,
12-show tour with longtime music superstars
Vince Gill and Amy Grant. But Hugh
Johnson, 21-year FOH engineer and production
manager for Gill, takes it in stride, delivering
excellence through consistency with a
dedicated production team giving their best
each day.
Catching up with Johnson at Nashville’s
Ryman Auditorium, I got a glimpse into the
Twelve Days of Christmas production and
some of the gear and techniques the crew
uses to ensure that the theater-sized shows
gave audiences the powerful sound yet intimate
feel that Gill and Grant wanted to share
during the holidays. Ranging in size from the
2,300 seat Ryman up to the 4,600 seat Fox
Theater in Atlanta, the tour showcased the
talent of not only the headliners but also
Gill’s top-notch band, including a four-piece
horn section added for the holiday shows.
Sound Image provided all FOH and monitor
audio support for the tour, although at
five venues including the Ryman the installed
house PA was used. The Ryman system
is comprised of JBL VerTec line arrays at
left and right with subs in a center cluster
that provide coverage in the balcony and
deck-stacked VerTec speakers and subs for
the floor seating. Front fills include JBL and
Sound Image speakers and a delay ring of
JBL 4212 speakers provide under-balcony
coverage. Crown amps drive all speakers,
and Ryman house audio engineer Les Banks
manages the system through a Lake Contour
wireless speaker controller, which is a
key tool for visiting audio engineers to tune
the room.
Acoustic Challenges FOH
Johnson has mixed well over a hundred
shows at the Ryman, and is well-accustomed
to the acoustic challenges that the room
presents. The all-wood design (the build-
20
Production Profile
Vince Gill
&
Amy Grant
Twelve Days of Christmas Tour
Story & Photos by GregKopchinski
ing was originally designed as a church and
the audience sits in wood pews throughout
the venue) creates a stark contrast between
sound check and performance due to the
change in high/mid frequency response
when the room fills with people.
Tuning each room for Vince Gill’s shows
is of paramount importance to Johnson,
who depends on his ears and his trustworthy
Klark Teknik DN6000 RTA (paired with
its original room mic) to adjust the system.
Starting with Banks’ house preset, Johnson
walks the upper and lower zones of the
room with the Lake Contour to fine-tune
during sound check, knowing that some adjustments
will need to be made in real-time
during the opening songs to compensate
for the audience. Andrew Dowling and Todd
Wines, assisting in tech duties from Sound
Image, also use a SMAART analyzer to dou-
Besides the atypical acoustics, touring
groups at the Ryman also mix from a unique
position: at the top of the balcony against
the back wall aisle, which remains open for
audience access throughout the show.
ble check the room response throughout
the show.
Besides the atypical acoustics, touring
groups at the Ryman also mix from a unique
position: at the top of the balcony against
the back wall aisle, which remains open for
audience access throughout the show. The
house console sits at center, but many tours
including Gill’s bring in their own FOH gear
which is set up in an area to the left of center,
somewhat midway between the left side
array and center subs. The tight fit is a cinch
for Johnson, who pilots an Avid Venue Profile
console and single outboard rack at FOH.
Although the mix position is off-axis from
any sweet spot, Johnson knows the sound
differences between his position and the
balcony seats below, and assembles a full
mix through some magical reference offset
in his mind.
The Processing Chain FOH
To get the consistent, smooth vocal that
Gill’s fans expect, Johnson utilizes his outboard
processing rack, routing the analog
JANUARY 2011 www.fohonline.com
From left, crew members Danny Poland, Todd Wines, Hugh Johnson, Sam Parker and Andrew Dowling
signal direct from the Shure KSM 9 mic into
a vintage Summit MPC-100A compressor for
warmth, followed by a BSS 901 multi-band
compressor. Back at the console, the vocals
get final processing with a Waves C4 plugin
at the console. Vince’s vocal turns out to
be the only analog signal (for the band) that
gets snaked to FOH; all other vocals and instruments
use the Avid stage rack and digital
snake (the show takes about 60 inputs
from stage to console, about a dozen more
than the usual Gill tour).
The tucked-away FOH position at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville
This routing may seem counterintuitive
at first, since the Profile is capable of
duplicating the front-end compression using
plug-ins, but Johnson explains that it
is far more convenient to reach over and
adjust a BSS setting on Gill’s vocal during
song changes rather than juggling control
screens to access a virtual knob and potentially
missing a cue for another event on the
control surface. The proof was obvious during
the show, when Gill would sing with different
vocal stylizations or talk to the audi-