For Hilary Duff’s return to the road with The Lucky Me Tour, we spoke to two of the Canadians on board: Monitor Engineer Nathan Bond and Monitor/RF Tech Bryan ‘Beav’ Van Rooyen.
Since the tour started in late June, Bond says: “It's going great; big shows. Everything’s sold out. It's been a lot of fun.”
Both are new additions to Hilary Duff’s crew, as is the band, and the Sound Devices Astral Wireless kit they’re touring with, Bond explains: “I got brought in right from the start when Hilary decided she was going to start touring again. So, me, our tour manager, FOH guy and guitar tech went down to LA and started rehearsals on day one. Then ‘Beav’ came on for the tour.”
We caught up with Bond and Van Rooyen in late July as they prepped for a pair of shows on July 29th and 30th in Nashville to talk about their experience using the Sound Devices gear, which, like the tour overall, is working out exceptionally well.
In all, the system consists of an Astral ARX16 True-Diversity Wireless Receiver with SpectraBand for all instruments and vocal wireless, deploying twelve Astral TX bodypacks and three Astral HH Wireless Handheld Microphone Transmitters equipped with Austrian Audio OC 707 wireless capsules.
“Once the opportunity came up to try it, we were interested,” Bond notes. “We were trying to put a kit together that would work worldwide, without having to swap anything out, frequency-wise, so that was a huge plus. I had never used Astral before, but I have friends who have, and everyone was raving about it. So we took out the Astral ARX16.”
“Our bassist and our two guitar players are using it, coming out of unit analogue,” he adds. “For vocals it’s just Hillary,” but we're using three different mics throughout the show, each on their own frequency, and doing some interesting routing with those within the Astral ARX16.
“The ARX16 allows us to route multiple transmitters to the same Dante output and use the Audio Mute function,” Bond continues. Right now we have Hilary’s main mic, two different ‘coloured’ mics that come in and out through the show, and a spare. Again, they're all on with their own frequencies and muted. So we can unmute whichever is meant to be active at any given moment, which is great because FOH doesn’t have to worry about channels or anything like that. It's seamless.”
It’s also Van Rooyen’s first time out with an Astral rig. “Like Nathan, a few friends have used it on tour recently, and I heard a lot of good things. For me, the best thing is the wide tuning range; not having to worry about which frequency band we’re on, or what's going to work in a given city. Because we've been touring the world, it's nice to have one piece of gear that works everywhere.
“That’s a massive benefit,” he adds. “We've been in some pretty tough RF environments. Some of the classics like Dallas and Chicago. And also Phoenix and Salt Lake City, which are all very busy spectrum-wise. Not having to worry about which band we’re in, it’s been a lifesaver.”
In addition to recommendations from their peers on other tours, their trust in GerrAudio also played a part in the decision to take the Sound Devices Astral rig out. Both point to the lengthy relationship with GerrAudio.
“I’ve had a great relationship with them over the years, so exploring the Astral Kit felt like a natural fit. It was something we were excited to explore, and I’m glad we did.” Bond says, adding that they’ve also brought out other Gerr-represented products; namely, a DiGiCo Q338 console with a KLANG card for monitors. “I've been using KLANG for the last seven years, on everything I've done, so I knew I wanted to have it in there (for this tour).”
Astral’s GainForward architecture, a proprietary feature that allows for remote control of the packs, is also a great help, Bond says: “That’s a huge benefit. You don't have to worry about gain or sensitivity settings on each unit. Everything is ready to go. When we first tried it out, we had everything running analogue. We were slightly nervous about putting everything into Dante because you don't have much control over output gain. But, level-wise, it came into our desks perfectly and sounded super clean. The audio quality is great.”
That spoke to a core goal they wanted to achieve with the system: “Keeping everything as clean as possible and the conversions down to a minimum,” he adds. “That’s huge.”
“Having (remote) two-way communication with all the devices,” Van Rooyen puts in. “Our guitar packs live in guitar world. I do all my coordination and then push the frequencies right to the packs. Our guitar tech charges the batteries over there. So, since the start of the tour, I haven't even seen the packs. The time savings there, alone, are incredible; instead of holding up every pack to the transmitter and syncing it, it’s just hitting a button, and all sixteen channels are done.”
As for the folks on stage: “No news is good news,” Bond sums up. “I don't get a lot of complaints, but I also don't get a lot of asks. Everything's been very smooth.”
Sound Devices Hits the Road with Hilary Duff