Back On The Road with Katherine Jenkins
9th January 2012
RG Jones Hire Department has kicked off this year with Katherine Jenkins Daydream Tour, which started in Oxford on the 7th January, and is appearing in 21 cities across the UK. Appearing alongside Katherine on stage is Nathan Pacheco and the great conductor, Anthony Inglis. RG’s relationship with Anthony Inglis spans many decades and we are very proud to work with such gifted and charismatic artists.
Looking after Katherine are some of the best sound engineers in the industry. With Simon Hodge mixing FOH, Steve Carr on Monitors, Al Woods on system and Tim Wann on stage it’s little wonder that they have managed to capture her astonishing vocal range backed by the National Symphony Orchestra.
Katherine says “.Daydream is a very intimate album and I wanted my tour to reflect that. It’s a chance for my fans to see me up close and personal in some of the UK’s most beautiful theatres”.
Katherine Goes Underground as a Busker
No stranger to “up close and personal”, RG’s provided equipment and rehearsal space for Katherine’s impromptu performance at Leicester Square Station back in November.
Battery powered speakers was a step back in time for RG’s, and Simon Hodge had to come up with a solution. The brief was to provide a world class PA and control system for a faux busk on the London Underground. It had to be fully battery powered and portable enough that the artist could just walk in with no load in or rig and start the gig straight away and also to take up no floor space outside of the busking semicircle!
Simon explains “I devised a plan based around a Nagra portable digital playback machine the LB2 which enabled top quality playback with a backup drive on board in case of problems. (I was concerned about being close to high tension rails too!) I coupled this with a Sound Devices 552 portable mixer - this unit though basic had some EQ and enough outputs for what we needed”.
The mixer fed an Anchor Explorer battery powered speaker - this had the advantage of having an inbuilt UHF receiver - which coupled with a Sennheiser portable transmitter meant that we could be wireless from the PA. A second transmitter sent an aux feed to a Sennheiser G3 in ear system for Katherine's in ear monitoring. A further Sennheiser portable receiver was used to receive the signal from Katherine's radio handheld - a Sennheiser 2000 series handheld.
Simon continues “I realised that despite the environment being fairly reverberant I might still need a reverb unit (opera doesn't sound right dry), I searched high and low for a battery powered unit but to no avail. It was in fact Pete McGlynn who came up with the genius plan of a guitar FX pedal - PP3 power! Having investigated various brands I settled on the Boss RV-5 which has a not too shabby Hall reverb! This meant was that I could run the playback, mix with vocal, add reverb - all in a portable package that we could use our Oyster cards to go through the barrier and walk down the escalator with - plonk the speaker down and start the gig!”
All a bit clever really, and it would certainly have made Old Man Jones proud!
http://www.ents24.com/web/artist/72618/Katherine_Jenkins.html