ference. On the Midas, I really use it for the
EQs, which are great, and the preamp. My
primary effects are outboard, a couple of
them are onboard ones, and then all the
rest of the compression and I use gating on
the console.”
As Blakely says nonchalantly, Billy Tal-
ent is a four-piece rock band and “there’s
no reinventing of the wheel.” As for his out-
board pieces, he loves the classic Lexicon
480L signal processor. “I use the two reverb
engines, one for drums and one for vocals.
With Ben [Kowalewicz, lead singer], it’s all
delays and they are done onboard. I use
the one that’s just stock on there, so I have
a long and short delay and don’t really use
a lot of reverb on Ben. I’ll put a little splash
on there depending on the song, like
maybe for ‘Surrender’ or one of the more
ballad-type styles.”
Blakely continues: “I have six distress-
ors in there, all with British Mode, and an
Avalon [VT-747SP compressor and EQ] on
stereo image. I have a pair on the drums,
which is my double buss on the drums
with lots of gain just smacking the crap out
of it, and then I have one on the bass. Ian
[D’Sa, guitarist]’s vocal, Jon [Gallant, bass-
ist]’s vocal, and Ben are on distressors at
various points, but it’s the speed of it that
I love because the band is really dynamic
and they’re really fast. So that speed is
really integral and I’ve said to any console
manufacturer or anyone who’s doing it
that, ‘As soon as you make something that
sounds like a distressor, I’m in. If you can
build a comp that sounds like that thing
and it sounds just like it, I am totally in.’ So
until that happens, I am still using my out-
board stuff.”
Over at monitors on this show was
Eamon de Freitas. He’s not the band’s full-
time monitor engineer, but has a lot of
experience with Billy Talent having done
a tour with the band in 2013-14 and regu-
larly filling in for festivals and other one-off
shows. “They’re one of those bands where
you can be doing 300 people in Niagara
Falls on the American side and then a Ger-
man festival for 80,000 people,” says
de Freitas.
Though the band keeps wedges
onstage – in this case Outline SM115s,
Doppias, a T9 SF amp, and a DVS118 drum
sub, which were used by the support
acts – they’re only there for backup as the
band prefers in-ears. Their in-ears of choice
are JH16s from JH Audio with Sennheiser
SR 2050 IEM transmitters and EK 2000 IEM
receivers. The band made the switch to
in-ears a couple of years ago, prompted
by a time Kowalewicz got sick, which af-
fected his ability to hear himself on stage.
“He tried it out and then he never went
back. Aaron [Solowoniuk], their drummer,
was already there and I want to say their
bassist may have been there already, but
then everybody came across to the idea. I
mean, the stage volume was so obliterat-
ingly loud,” recalls de Freitas. “At one point,
Ben had six wedges. He had four in front
and then two more pushing up his ass
behind, and these side fills of death. The
stage volume was just getting out of hand.
Obviously, you know how that affects the
front of house sound. I mean, the ears are
still ripping loud, but at least it’s a lot more
controllable.”
From the Avid Venue Profile console,
de Freitas says Billy Talent, like many rock
bands, like a pretty standard mix with their
own instrument and voice quite loud and
the other instruments in the background.
He doesn’t use any outboard gear or plug-
ins and not even any EQ on D’Sa’s guitar.
“He has razor sharp ears, and I mean razor
sharp,” says de Freitas of the lead guitarist.
“He will ask for like a change of .2 or .3 dB
of his guitar or whatever and if it goes to .5
dB, he’ll be like, ‘too loud, too loud!’ He has
fantastic ears. He’s also a producer and so
he spends a lot of time in studios.”
The only bit of EQing de Freitas does
is on Kowalewicz, who, as anyone who’s
heard the band knows, has an unusually
high and nasally voice for a rock singer. “He
does have that kind of nasally thing, which
you have to cut out, but also that’s where
a lot of his power comes from. Like there
is quite a bit taken out in the mid and the
upper-mid range,” de Freitas says. “He does
have a very peculiar voice for sure. Also, he
switches up how he holds the mic a lot, so
obviously that makes a huge difference.
When he cups the mic, it kind of gets de-
stroyed a little bit, it comes apart, but he
hears it. Having in-ears has forced him to
change the way he sings a little bit, which
is good.”
Catching back up with Blakely by
phone a couple weeks after the show, he
first laments: “That night the weather was
a real bastard. I’ll be 100 per cent honest
with you, I didn’t have a great time mixing
myself, and it was nothing to do with the
PA system I had, but we had about 50 or
60 km crosswinds, so I never really got a
chance to really hear it to its full potential.”
That said, he notes more positively, “Be-
cause it was such a windy night, there were
a couple of things that stuck out. It held
its intelligibility, I would say up to at least 4
kHz, maybe five, pretty consistently, even
in the crosswind. The PA was still staying
static that at least we got a mix together,
something intelligible. We could get all the
vocals out and stuff like that. The high stuff
obviously blew away, but it kept together
and stayed together at a pretty hefty SPL
and I was probably running an average of,
I’d say, 103dBA and peaked out at 104 or
105, but 102 or 103 was the average and it
held that all day and all night.”
Outline GTO array
Because of the short and wide config-
uration, not having a long throw distance
was a big help under the windy conditions.
“Mike and the guys said they had pretty
good coverage and we didn’t have lots of
boos or anything from the audience, so
that was good. People were really recep-
tive and you can always tell if people are
walking away, but people were loving it,”
Blakely adds. “I would definitely use the PA
again and would love to try it again under
some better conditions and in a few differ-
ent deployments.”
Under those conditions, that is a
pretty good review from someone like
Blakely. Ultimately, though, what matters is
how the show went for the band and their
fans. On that front, things were perfect,
and probably no one is happier about that
than Brian Bates. “We’re Hamilton-based,
we’re community-based, and I want to
do everything that I can do to support
the arts in Hamilton,” he says. “People say
Hamilton is starting to turn a corner; well
they just haven’t been involved, because
we’ve more than turned a corner… and
I’m glad to be doing this in Hamilton and
building up Hamilton. It’s not about me
and it’s not about anyone else; it’s building
community.”
Michael Raine is the Senior
Editor of Professional Sound
PROFESSIONAL SOUND 29