The idea of a listening party eventually became a vision for an entire
cross-Canada tour, which would take the band into venues that can’t han-
dle regular concerts with a PA. Thackeray spent three days in Montreal to
learn both the Avid S6L console and the Spat software and how they would
make the shows work. That was followed with four days of preproduction
with the band and full rig set up in a studio.
“We would run the set and I would record it all – I have my MacBook
Pro hooked up with Venue Link to the S6L so it makes the whole thing a
breeze – then the guys would come to front of house and all throw on
headphones at the distro and we would play it back and listen to the
spatial moves that we had been working on. We would be like, ‘Okay, that
was cool, but what if we tried this?’ So, it was just trial and error like that
for four days straight,” recalls Thackeray.
What the final set-up looked like in each venue was about 64 seats in
front of a small “stage,” with each seat having a pair of wired Audio-Technica
ATH-PRO5X headphones connected to 16-channel headphone distros. At
FOH, Thackeray was on an Avid S6L 16C console connected via MADI inter-
faces to two Mac Mini I7s, one primary and one redundant.
“I do believe this can be scaled to 500 seats and up. Some great
companies are always furthering development of wireless technology,
and very soon I think the latency will be low enough and the sound
quality good enough to do all the distribution with people’s smart-
phones. For right now, wired distribution was the best option for us
– cost effective, no latency... The only downside is the sheer amount of
cabling,” says Thackeray.
As he and Kopperud sat with Professional Sound in the warehouse
of Collective Arts Brewing in Hamilton, ON ahead of that night’s show,
surrounded by towers of kegs and beer-making machinery, Thackeray
explained: “So, the signal flow goes from two [Avid Venue] Stage 16 stage
boxes, Cat-6 to the engine at front-of-house, then to the console. I do all
of our EQ and dynamics in the console with either plug-ins or the chan-
nel strips, then we unassign everything from the left and right, patch the
direct-outs of each channel to the MADI card in the E6L engine that we
added, out of the MADI card into the MADI interfaces, out of the MADI
interfaces to the Mac Minis, and processed in Spat where we spatialize ev-
erything to two rooms – one binaural room and one stereo room. So, the
binaural room is everything that we want to be spatialized in the virtual
room; essentially everything we want to have fun with. Then, the stereo
room is kick drum, bass synth, and bass guitar. I wanted a more traditional
impact from those instruments, so we chose to do it like that because I
didn’t really want sub bass to be spatialized. I wanted it to hit you hard -
dead centre. We return those two rooms from Spat back through MADI to
the console and then we sum those two rooms in the console and assign
them to the LR bus, then patch the LR out to the headphone distros
through the stage I/O.”
The end result was that each audience member had the best seat
in the house. But beyond that, they felt like they were floating in musical
space. With each person having a full binaural mix, they were literally
placed in the centre of the music.
It was important to the engineer and the band that they didn’t take
the spatial effects and movements too far. Any movements in the binaural
mix had to complement the music and bring the listener deeper into it,
not distract from it. When first testing out the software and during prepro-
duction days in the studio or just on his laptop at home, Thackeray says
he tried very atypical mixes with extreme spatial effects and movements
swirling around the listener’s head. “Once we got into the studio with Spat,
you realized that people are used to seeing something move and hearing it
come from that place in space, so if you take it completely out of context, it
can be a little disorienting. So, we definitely pick our moments.”
During the concerts, the engineer says the goal was to be “tasteful”
and stay true to the album, because the point was to showcase the mu-
sic. He used about 50 snapshots during the shows, often doing things like
SETTING UP AT COLLECTIVE ARTS BREWING IN HAMILTON, ON
lifting a guitar in elevation, or taking a synth pad about 50 ft. out in space
and sweeping it around the listener’s head.
“In one song, we take the drum kit image, which in the binaural
room is kick drum and snare in the middle-ish, floor tom off to the side,
hi-hat off to the side, and stereo overheads. We take that fairly traditional
image and shift the entire thing off to your right. In a typical situation if
you did that, you would just have instruments in your right ear or what-
ever, but with Spat, you actually have a depth of image and hear the
reflection off the left wall of the virtual room and you have this amazing
depth where it doesn’t feel like it’s in your right ear; it actually feels like it’s
beside you. And then when it comes to the chorus, we snap it in front of
you. So, it’s doing stuff like that where we’re trying to push it, but we’re
still trying to be true to the music and the record while exercising what
we can with this software.”
Aside from creating a unique auditory experience, the other aspect
of the headphone concerts is the band was free to play anywhere. With-
out the need to worry about room acoustics and rigging a PA, they were
able to play on a rooftop, in an art gallery, and in breweries, for example.
At the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg, the audience was on the
stage facing the house as the theatre’s beautiful architecture became the
backdrop. As well, in keeping it a celebration of art, each show featured
a local visual artist who created real-time interruptions of the music that
were projected onto a screen behind the band.
“When you have the headphones on, and because of Spat and Kel-
lan’s mixing abilities, when you close your eyes, it’s as if you can physically
see where the hi-hat is or physically see where the bass is,” says Kopperud
in closing. “The only comparison I can think of is when I was in New York
at Sterling Sound in the mastering suite where you can hear all those
little nuances. I know this is bold to say, but this is really capturing that
type of quality but in a live context. It is really cutting edge and – I will
just say it – unprecedented.”
Michael Raine is the Senior Editor at Professional Sound
PROFESSIONAL SOUND 35