There are some people who painstakingly pick out their targets and visit touring productions solely to experience hi-fi sound at concert levels; not many, but a few. For Gary Bradshaw mixing ‘house sound’ on George Michael’s Symphonica tour, that discerning listenership is being expanded on a nightly basis as Michael’s fans are treated to what is, by universal approbation, one of the most articulate renditions heard in the concert barns of Europe. “The PA is sitting at around 93 / 94 dB,” Bradshaw volunteered, “and with lots of space in the arrangements I don’t have to do anything.”

 Bradshaw is being a little coy, but we know what he means. His association with George Michael is long, so too his use of a d&b J-Series system for Michael’s concerts. He is also the lucky recipient of remarkable collaborative support from Wigwam Acoustics, a long term d&b audiotechnik Partner and a company that goes to extraordinary lengths to reconcile an extremely complex performance milieu to a pristine listening experience. “I’m mixing approximately a hundred channels,” Bradshaw explained. “George has a ten piece band, the same ones who recorded the Symphonica album, three backing vocalists; and then there is the orchestra, thirty-five of them. For them I’m using a variety of mainly DPA and Schertler mics, some Neumanns, Shure and Sennheiser; the larger instruments like the cellos and double basses are double-mic’d. The whole orchestra comes to the desk as separate channels except for the strings, which I take from Simon Hall who provides me with a set of stereo sub-mixes.” Hall and Andy ‘Baggy’ Robinson back stage are ostensibly the monitor team, though in reality they provide the nexus of the audio traffic management system that Wigwam has so indulgently provided. “We’re actually processing about a thousand channels of audio,” Robinson revealed.

“For this leg of the tour where we are playing arenas the J-Series is just so good for his voice and this style of music,” continued Bradshaw. “The musical arrangements are exquisite and it is my pleasure to mix them; with the J-Series you can hear all the detail everywhere in the room. For an engineer like me this is sitting down mixing, I need to apply almost no EQ to the PA, which leaves me entirely focussed on what’s being played. I do group the band and apply an overall EQ on them; but otherwise it’s all pretty flat. The whole system is really hi-fi; Wigwam did a great job on the last tour and they’ve done it again this time.”

With kind permission.