All Access: U2 iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour 2015

U2 has brought it back inside arenas, playing multiple dates in various cities, again with huge, stellar production values. Mix caught the fourth date of the iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour at the SAP Center in San Jose, Calif., where a ramp extended from the main stage all the way down the center of the arena to a circular B-stage, where the band performed several numbers. There’s also a huge LED video wall over the ramp that has a catwalk for the band to perform. Helping to make this all happen is the tour’s show designer, Willie Williams, and Production Manager, Jake Berry. We spoke with the band’s longtime sound engineers about the tour’s audio. - 

“Jo Ravitch is the best systems engineer there is,” says U2 FOH engineer Joe O’Herlihy. “We have relied on each other for over 30 years now; that is what working together really means. The FOH mix position has been the subject of many a solid debate on this tour because the P.A. system supplies a totally omnipresent sound in the arena—you can realistically put the FOH mix position anywhere. We’re up in the seats this time around, and it’s brilliant being with the audience because they are the people you spend your entire career trying to reach with perfect audio. “My console is a DiGiCo SD7,” he continues. “It’s extremely creative and reliable, which is why I have used DiGiCo the past 15 years. Across the whole audio team on this tour we are using a total of six SD7 consoles. We’re using all of the available processing power and we are running at 96k. I don’t use any Waves DigiGrid plug-ins. While the onboard dynamic processing on the SD7 is fantastic, I prefer the real deal—lots of vintage processing Manley VOX Box, Avalon 737SP, Summit Audio DCL200s, TC2290 DDL, TC D-TWO, SPX1000, Lexicon 480L, Lexicon PCM 70.” - 

“The band has been using Clair systems for 30-plus years and for this tour we’re using the new Clair vertical array system called the Cohesion 12,” O’Herlihy explains. “My sound design concept for this tour was based upon our show design brief from the band—that the main stage, the runway stage and the round stage were to be entirely used throughout the show. The P.A. system is typically set up using a stereo image across 12 vertical arrays equidistant from one another, complemented by eight hangs of three Cohesion CP-218 subs using the cardioid method for bass steering into the arena. The P.A. system also incorporates the Cohesion 8, which is distributed as a downfill and center fill system above the front of the main stage, the runway stage and the round stage; we also use the Cohesion 8 as front fill following the same line of the various stages at stage level to maximize the audio quality on the arena floor areas.” - 

“As I essentially have one mix to focus on, I submix my inputs through stereo audio groups assigned to the center faders to make it feel closer to how I mix in the studio—drums, bass, guitars, etc.,” says monitor engineer Richard Rainey. “I get to spend a lot of time on details that maybe in a traditional setup you wouldn’t be able to. As a lot of Edge’s playing requires very precise timing, the feel of the mix is very important, as is obviously giving him the best timing info I can to play off, which is probably my main focus during the show. After that it’s just turning up the quiet bits and turning down the loud ones till he looks happy.” - 

The Edge’s vocal headset is a Shure Beta 54. He has two Vox and one Fender Harvard guitar amps miked with Shure Beta 58As, and two Fender Deluxes miked with Shure SM57s.  

“Bono uses a standard Shure Beta 58A,” says his monitor engineer, Alastair McMillan. “Then I have an analog chain that goes directly into an SSL X desk to be summed with the SD7 outputs. It’s very clean in that classic SSL way and has loads of headroom, which was an important feature as his vocal is very dynamic. There’s something about his voice that hits the compressors and effects in a unique way. It’s impossible to replicate during setup! So I just have to start with a basic setting and dial it in once he starts singing.” For in-ear monitors the band is trying something different—the JH Audio JH-16s for everyone except for The Edge and his engineer Richard Rainey, who opted for the JH Roxanne in-ears. - 

“The DiGiCo SD7 I’m using is extremely powerful and reliable. It can do anything we throw at it,” says Bono monitor engineer Alastair McMillan, pictured at left with monitor engineer CJ Eiriksson (Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton) and monitor engineer Richard Rainey (the Edge), each of whom also has an SD7. “We’re using all of the available processing power, which is quite impressive for a four piece band! I’m a big fan of the new classic EQ option and especially the multiband compressors. With those two features I have everything I need so I decided not to opt for the Waves grid. We’re all running at 96k. I am hooked up to Pro Tools via two Madi bridges which are able to sample convert in real time. This way we can run our Pro Tools sessions at 48k, making them a much more manageable size.” - 

“We have a fairly traditional mic setup for Larry [Mullen’s] drums, from Shure 421s on toms, to 57s on top and bottom snare, and Audio-Technica 4050s for overheads,” says monitor engineer CJ Eiriksson. “We keep the mics fairly close and tight on everything, which helps keep the arena bleed out of drums as much as possible.  - 

“For this tour Adam [Clayton] has simplified his whole setup,” Eiriksson continues. “We have ditched the bass subs and only have an Ampeg B15 on stage. There are a couple extra DIs and another amp selection running under the stage, but they are only used when needed for different flavors on particular songs.”  - 

Article and all photos by Steve Jennings

http://www.mixonline.com/

Willie Williams On U2’s Innocence + Experience

U2 is full steam ahead on the iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour, playing arenas this time around, rather than the huge stadiums of past tours like 360° and continuing on after the blow of the band manager’s unexpected death last week.

We caught up with creative director Willie Williams for a multi-part interview on working with set designers Es Devlin and Ric Lipson (Stufish), sound designer Joe O’Herlihy, the evolution of this tour design, and designing U2 without the late Mark Fisher.

Live Design: So, given the propensity for you and the band to start early, how long ago did this one start?

Willie Williams: The first meeting of the band and creative team was in March 2013, so the design process was a little over two years. That said, the first conversation I had with Bono about “the next tour” was on the last tour, which tends to be where these things start. Even then, on the 360°  tour, Bono was asking where we should go next and suggested that, in contrast to the 200 trucks of steel, we should start the next show under a single, naked light bulb.

The tour was due to start in the spring of 2014, but, what with one thing and another, ended up being delayed for a year, so we had a very extended design period.

LD: What were your design goals, as well as the band’s?

WW: As ever, this U2 show was borne of dialog with the band. Every U2 tour has had some kind of touchstone from which everything has grown—white flags, The Blues, architecture, a job reapplication, and of course, once it all stemmed from a pair of wraparound shades. On this project, the genesis was narrative. It’s the narrative that runs through the album: the story of four teenagers growing up in ‘70s Dublin looking out of their bedroom windows and trying to figure out how they fit into the often violent and disrupted world outside.

LD: We talked at LDI about this notion of two different shows, alternating nights. Did that happen?

WW: We fully intended to have two different set lists and make it a pair of shows. This idea survived all the way to the beginning of the music rehearsals, at which point it became apparent that it wasn’t really viable. I really believe that they could have rehearsed enough songs for two shows, and I would have very much enjoyed being able to delve into the catalog, but the question of which songs would be left out of any given show became too big to get around. The potential upset that a punter buys a ticket for the “wrong” show, depending on their personal taste, began to make it a bit of a minefield.

LD: What is the overall feel of the design?

WW: We appear to have created a mash-up of performance, sound, video, and lighting, some of which I honestly don’t think anyone has been seen before. It’s quite a strange show in some ways, but the arc of it manages to hang together in an unexpected and pleasing way. The centerpiece is this screen-bridge-stage-light-rig hybrid object which at times is the performance area and at other times obliterates the performance area. I say it’s the centerpiece, but for much of the show, we completely ignore it, opting for the most basic rock ‘n’ roll stance imaginable.

At the other extreme, the more theatrical moments combine all of the show elements in a new and entirely modern way. After half an hour of no-bullshit rock ‘n’ roll, a giant double-sided television fills the airspace of the arena. We show some pictures, and then the singer climbs into the television, and we see him in there, physically part of the video images, hanging in the middle of the room. It’s really quite odd but entirely magical.

Willie Williams: Around The World In Two Years

Willie Williams, the father of The Claw

The roving spaceship that was U2 360° touched down for the last time in Moncton, Canada on July 30, after two years and $700 million in ticket sales, leaving nearly 150 industry types (including, weirdly, 33 Belgians) looking for work. One of those finally finding some free time again is Willie Williams, who served as the creative brainchild and show director of the tour.

During rehearsals in Barcelona, Williams joked about the birthing process of The Claw and its various parts. (Live Design provided extensive online coverage of the tour when it debuted in 2009). Now that the three 29,000sq-ft. steel structures have all grown up and headed out into the world (they are actually for sale for anyone with a cool $20 million lying around), David Johnson recently caught up with Williams, who has returned to the bucolic tranquility of his nursery in Suffolk, for a post-mortem.

David Johnson: After 110 shows, and, apparently, 11 babies born to staffers, your baby, U2 360°, finally came to a close last month. How does it feel?

Willie Williams: I’m well aware that rock tours don’t end gradually; they steam ahead at full speed until smacking into the dead-stop brick wall of the final show. Injuries can result, so with something as monumental as the 360° tour, I made a point of pacing the final month or so of the tour. Watching the show each night, I’d make myself consciously aware that these were the final occasions on which this extraordinary thing would exist and that, shortly, it would go away forever. I watched it from all over the building and, in Pittsburgh, even made a point of dragging Ethan Weber up to the nosebleed seats, as he’d only ever seen the show from behind the lighting console.

Photo Eoin McLoughlin

The general feeling among the crew was one of finishing college. Nick Barton, lighting crew chief, pointed out that it had been remarkably like attending college—a three-year course with its various breaks, when we’d part for a while before regrouping at the start of the next semester. As with leaving school, we now go into the world feeling a new life chapter has started—older, wiser, and looking for work.

DJ: The look of the show changed quite a lot between the first show in Barcelona and the last show in Moncton. What factors drove that?
WW: U2 360° ran for such a long time that it was really three tours that changed quite distinctly in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Part of the drive for change came from our going across North America and Europe twice and wanting to not just trot out the same show, especially as the DVD of the ‘09 version was already on sale. My goal for going back to North America in ‘11 was to have at least 50% of the show be entirely new since the DVD.

Another driving factor is simply the personality of U2, which never rests on its laurels and continually evolves creatively. Having most of the facilities we needed on tour with us, making new material and adding new songs wasn’t overly costly, with a couple of exceptions, so the beginning of each new leg would always bring changes. There’s also a permanent desire within U2 to make the show relevant to the city or country that they’re in, so a great many songs and elements are bespoke per show. This is, of course, endless and exhausting to keep up with, but it keeps the show alive and vital. The audience appreciates it enormously too, so it is definitely time well spent.

Some of it was just carried by its own momentum; we did it because we realized that we could. We have a great ongoing relationship with NASA and the loose “space station” theme was really fun. Starting with the live link-ups to the International Space Station, through to Commander Mark Kelly giving shout outs to each city, singing “Beautiful Day,” and quoting the David Bowie song lyric while floating in space, we were just showing off, really.

DJ: What is your most memorable moment of the tour?WW: Of course it’s impossible to narrow it down to just one moment with so many extraordinary landmarks along the way. If I had to pick one thing, though, it would be the high mirrorball, as I can be entirely sure that nobody will ever pay for something as insane as that ever again—a meter-wide mirror ball with built-in lightning conductor placed 150' up in the air to be hit by eight 5K Xenon [Zap Technology] BigLites, each of which had to be craned up individually to locations 85' off the ground. On good fog nights, the entire stadium filled with the snow-globe dots and moving beams, so massive, so completely kitsch and yet undeniably moving, like the missing scene from Lord of the Rings.

DJ: Any other highlights?WW: The astonished delight in the faces of seasoned professionals on seeing the first inconceivablyenormous pieces of The Claw. Opening night in Barcelona: seeing this thing surrounded by an audience for the first time. The Mexico City shows: three nights at nearly 110,000 people per night. The apocalyptic rain in Zurich. A stadium-full of cell phone lights. Wading through the mud at Glastonbury with Allen Branton. The week when we did two video content shoots, one in space and one in Burma. Commander Mark Kelly’s rendition of “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station. Creating a set list that referenced every single U2 album. Hugh Masekela joining the band on stage in Johannesburg to play horn on “Still Haven’t Found…,” possibly the most musically magical moment of U2’s entire career.

DJ: Where on earth are concerts going to go from here?WW: U2 360° is certainly a milestone in rock history, but I am not sure how much direct influence it will have on what other bands do. For a long time now, U2 has existed in its own adjunct of the performance world. Somebody said that this was the “Beijing Olympics of Rock” in that, while clearly being the pinnacle of something, it’s also the end of something, especially with civilization having collapsed since this project began. I can’t think of anyone who would be brave enough to stake what it would require to emulate this kind of tour design, unless Pink Floyd or the Stones come out for one more trip round the block.
As for U2, we’re already talking about the next one, and I’m excited about the ideas and the potential. It’s funny, on the Zoo TV tour, people would ask, “However will you follow this?” to which I would reply, “The next one will be bigger,” which, of course, it ended up being. This time around, though, I don’t think that’s a promise I’m going to make.

DJ: We know you will be enjoying some downtime in the short term. Any long term plans?WW: I have a lot of video content projects on the go via my partnership with Sam Pattinson at The Third Company. I really enjoy these, as I don’t have to be so hands-on, but the projects are interesting—Batman arena show, Elton John’s Las Vegas show, etc. I’m also involved in the development of a couple of theatre shows and my own domestic art projects, but there’s certainly no master plan to follow the U2 tour. Career strategy hasn’t really been a hallmark of my life other than just to follow things that I think are interesting and to work with people who are inspiring. In that sense, I suppose I’ll be carrying on as normal.

DJ: I suspect you might want to give a few shout-outs some of your team members who made it all possible. Shout away.WW: There would have been no 360° tour without Mark Fisher, my co-designer from start to finish, or withoutJake Berry, who, from the word go, was determined to make this impossible task become possible. The enthusiasm of Hedwig De Meyer and Stageco was vital in gaining early confidence that this might be feasible. The willingness, yet again, of Joe O’Herlihy to design his sound system around ludicrous parameters, but without compromising audio quality, was key to this becoming an environment in which U2 might actually want to perform. Frederic Opsomer conceived the expanding video screen and sought outChuck Hoberman to figure out how to engineer an object that expands through three dimensions simultaneously. Tom Krueger is probably the only man alive who could have calmly looked Jake Berry in the eye and told him that we needed 14 cameras on the road to shoot this, and Stefaan “Smasher” Desmedt, who switched those 14 cameras each night and effortlessly became the best touring video director currently living. Ethan Weber for all his input and for remaining the bastion of calm even though yoked to the grand experiment that was Alex Murphy. Craig Hancock for stepping into the breach so admirably. Nick Barton for knowing no fear and the lampies for so fluently blending talent, verve, and good looks. Raff Buono for the video screen aerobics. Luke Halls, Damian Hale, Run Wrake, Eoin McLoughlin, and all the video creatives. Sam Pattinson for making video content painless for once. Stef Vanbiesen for video programming and operation. Declan Gaffney for his countless sonic contributions and for not minding me being all over his ProTools. Sharon Blankson for the laser jacket. Morleigh Steinberg for the hanging microphone. Gavin Friday for the objective eye and ear. XL Video, PRG, Tait, Clair, CAT, and Brilliant Stages. Rocko Reedy and theentire 360° touring crew who not only made this insane project happen but managed to make it an enormously fun enterprise. Paul McGuinness and Arthur Fogel for their trust and confidence. And, of course, U2 themselves who, somehow, even in the face of 200 trucks of gear, managed to keep the show first and foremost about music.

http://livedesignonline.com

Willie Williams Shows 360º Videos

Willie Williams,set designer of 360º tour, has shared two new videos with the screen content being used in the last leg of the tour, especially in "Moment of Surrender":

And the second with the questions sent  for the questions contest shared during  "Miss  Sarajevo"

 

http://www.youtube.com/user/NealStStudio

U2 Discuss Their Latest Tour

   

An article that appears in the Australian The Age:

The idea for U2's latest tour came at the end of the band's last visit to Australia, in 2006.
The idea for U2 360° came at the end of the band's last visit to Australia, in 2006.
''Bono walked into a meeting and asked if he could play in the round next time,'' production manager Jake Berry recalls. ''I said, 'Of course you can.'''
Designer Willie Williams, who has worked with U2 since 1982, set to work with architect Mark Fisher. ''I didn't expect to have such a concrete idea. But an idea dropped into my head about the 360° concept.''

 

He pitched an idea for a stage based on the iconic tower at Los Angeles airport. ''The band loved it,'' Williams says. ''They're still ambitious and always want to advance the form in some way.''
Williams describes the show as the third in a trilogy that follows his co-creations Zoo TV and PopMart.
''Those two shows were ground-breaking in advancing the form,'' he says. ''History has turned Zoo TV into something magical. PopMart had the first large LED screens the planet had seen. It seems mad now because it's standard practice for rock shows. After that, the floodgates opened.''
The team spent two years working on the logistics of 360°. The tour would require an investment of about $150 million to become feasible - a monster gamble for any rock band. Still, it paid off; the tour grossed $311 million in 2009.
Throughout the tour, there are three stages, or ''claws'', in motion. The first is being shipped to Auckland. The remaining video, lighting and automation come from the six 747s on their way to Australia.
''It's very difficult to take a show like this to Australia and make it pay,'' Berry says.
So large is the show, the crew have had to dramatically remodel venues around the world. In Barcelona, the tiny cobbled roads outside the stadium made it impossible to load in the equipment. Berry and his team got permission to asphalt the road. In Dallas's Cowboys Stadium, existing video screens - including the world's largest - were moved to accommodate the stage. Many soccer stadiums have required new grass lawns.
''We have dug out tunnels to get trucks and cranes in the buildings,'' he says. ''We've spent some money.''
Due to the scale of the show, U2 have purchased carbon offsets but Berry concedes a tour this size cannot have a clear eco-conscience.
''Carbon offsets were very high on our list,'' he says. ''We're doing as best as we can with it. With something this large, it's impossible to be 100 per cent.''

 www.theage.com.au