BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: As the front-of-house engineer for Howie Day, Brian Duffy has been a very busy man this year. He has been back and forth to Europe in addition to a couple of laps around North America. The tour began in January 2004 headlining soft seat theaters with the UK's Stereophonics, then went to Europe for a few weeks before they began a stint opening for
Canada's Barenaked Ladies, before the band and crew finally got a couple weeks of down time.
During the summer Howie and his band found themselves in the support slot
for O-A-R [a.k.a. "Of A Revolution"] in 5,000-seat, mostly outdoor,
venues.
As the year comes to an end, Howie and Brian will find themselves bopping
from soft seat to soft seat as Howie performs a solo acoustic show,
co-headlining with Nickelcreek.
From the PA "du jour" on their first swing around North America,
to club PA
du jour on their subsequent European adventure, an InnovaSON Sy80 on the
Barenaked Ladies tour to a Soundcraft Series 5 with O-A-R, and the current
Midas Venice for the Nickelcreek shows, the only constant has been Brian's
Drawmer 1969 and 1968 Mercenary Editions.
When it came time to start tour production rehearsals in Portland, Maine for
the Howie Day tour [Howie is originally from Bangor, Maine], Brian and
guitar tech, Scott Hamilton, took an afternoon from rehearsals to drive the
90 minutes to Mercenary Audio in Foxboro, Massachusetts. At Mercenary they
were able to try out a few tools in order to pick up some necessary
processing for the tour.
Brian had been quite impressed with the performance of the 1969ME on full
program material, but only had enough room in his rack for one of them,
which was relegated to acoustic guitar and vocal duties.
One side of the 1969ME was used for Howie's acoustic guitar, which came into
the pre-amp, then saw about 6dB of gain reduction from the compressor. Brian
explained, "I was holding that pretty heavily into the compression. I was
also using the polarity reverse switch on that."
Brian used the polarity switch on the 1969ME to work around some problems he
found with the guitar Howie chose to play. "The phase reversal on the guitar
was to correct some of the mid-range problems that were inherent to those
particular guitars. The problem is around 500-800Hz. By reversing the
polarity the problem moved down to around 250Hz, which was already pretty
heavily cut with the channel EQ."
The second channel of the Drawmer 1969ME mic-pre/compressor was employed for
keyboard vocals. With a medium attack and a fairly long release, while
pushing about 6dB of gain reduction, "I was more using it as a leveling
amplifier than as a compressor" Brian commented.
When Howie's tour rolled out with O-A-R in early July, the Drawmer 1968 had
finally become available. As the 1968ME is the compression section of the
1968ME without the mic pre's in a 1 RU enclosure, Brian picked one up and
had it shipped to the band's first date for use as his mix buss compressor.
It was immediately installed and employed from the first soundcheck on.
Without much prodding Brian commented that, "the 1968 is probably the
best stereo buss compressor I've never heard. The big function allows all the
nuance of the low-end of the program to get through, without compressing the
vocals out." Brian averaged around 3dB of gain reduction, while employing
a medium attack and a medium release time. "I love that thing," Brian
continued. "You get that on underpowered PAs, get those meters lit up until
they're bright red, turn the output gain up till it sizzles, and it seemed to
look back and me and say 'hey, is that all ya got?'"
Brian Duffy, front-of-house engineer for Howie Day,
makes sure he always has his Drawmer 1969 and 1968 Mercenary Editions on the
road with him.
For more information go to: www.mercenary.com
"this is not a problem."
