Robbie Williams performing live on his Take The Crown Tour
On Tour With RME For The Robbie Williams “Take The Crown” Tour
Robbie Williams was helped on his Stadium tour this summer by several RME MADI Bridges and an RME HDSPe Madi FX card. Audio supplier Britannia Row Productions provided the Robbie Williams “Take The Crown” tour with the RME equipment to achieve the complex MADI setup allowing a split of inputs between 2 Front Of House Consoles, a touring broadcast truck and a FOH recording setup powered by an RME HDSPe MADI FX card.
Nick Allen, Robbie Williams Front Of House Engineer for the tour, wanted to utilise a different set of pre-amps with his Avid Profile Console to achieve the best possible audio solution for a complex stadium show. By using the industry standard MADI format, it allowed us to interface 96 channels of Midas Pre-Amps into the Avid Profile as well as distributing these pre-amps to 4 destinations with multiple levels of redundancy. The system designed and maintained on the road by Britannia Row Productions.
Britannia Rows’ Josh Lloyd explains the setup;
Setting up and soundchecking before Robbie Williams’ show
“We utilised a pair of RME MADI Bridges on stage to take the 96 Channels of split into the system, these where picked up as 48 channels on each MADI stream (the remaining 16 channels used for routing of other audio around the network). The MADI signal was then sent over fibre to Front Of House and also split into a pair of RME ADI-642’s to provide the record truck with a feed whilst allowing them to break audience mics onto the remaining 16 lines on each stream.
By having a pair of RME MADI Bridges on stage it meant we could achieve redundancy both if we had failure of a unit or of a fibre optic running to FOH.
Once the MADI signal reached FOH, it was again taken into a further 3 RME MADI Bridges, this allowed a main and spare FOH console to be fed duplicate signals into them, as well as the recorder powered by the RME HDSPe MADI FX, which took 3 MADI streams taking the inputs from stage as well as stems from the FOH console.
To maintain the best possible audio signal chain, the signal out of the console was fed out of an RME ADI-6432R, this also interfaced all the outboard equipment into the console. By utilising the embedded MIDI on all the RME units simple switching between the main and backup console could be achieved as well as switching to virtual sound check mode to listen back to the recording.
RME MADI Bridges in use on the Robbie Williams Tour
The use of the RME equipment as well as its MIDI interfacing meant an incredibly complex routing set-up could be changed with the press of a button. As well as this, the amount of equipment was reduced due to the interfacing of 2 consoles and a truck into the same input stage.”
Robbie Williams is due to tour again in 2014, utilising RME once again for help on his “Swings Both Ways” shows – more information to follow.
Robbie Williams Swings Both Ways – Swings Back Into Action With RME
After a busy summer touring multiple nights at sold out stadiums around Europe, Robbie Williams is back out promoting his Number 1 album Swings Both Ways which received the highest pre-order in history on amazon. To help with this again, Robbie’s FOH engineer Simon Hodge is using an RME HDSPe MADI FX powered record system and RME MADI Bridge that proved 100% reliable over the summer.
The system being used on the current tour is fed from a Digico SD7 that is nearly full with over 112 inputs coming from the big band on stage. The advantage yet again with the RME MADI FX card, is that it can use industry standard MADI to receive audio and it is very stable and does not require lots of additional external interface cards or boxes, keeping it down to a very small footprint. As well as this, the card can be used with the engineers choice of DAW with no limitations on channel count imposed by some hardware or other DAWs.
The recorder has primarily been used to work on refining the mix during the rehearsals period however it also provided audio for the DVD soon to be released.
On top of the powerful 190-channel recorder system, the new RME MADIface USB has been used on some of the promotional shows to provide a secondary stem record system. The stem record system is being used for quick turn around of recordings for Radio broadcasts. The system takes 64 channels of audio from the SD7 comprising of a mixture of stereo and mono stems from the console to create a pre-eq’d and levelled mix that can be re-levelled to compensate for having being mixed in close proximity to the large big band. By using the great audio coming from Simon’s FOH outputs, the tracks can be quickly taken to be mixed down for radio to be broadcast within 12 hours.
Robbie Williams is due to tour in 2014.
Out thanks to Joshua Lloyd and Britannia Row Productions.