Adlib arms Florence + The Machine on world tour

Adlib supplied a large ‘racks-and-stacks’ audio package for Florence + The Machine on the recent UK leg of her current world tour.

Florence + The Machine has enjoyed a strong year with numerous highlights including her new album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful topping the charts in the UK and US and a headline set on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.

Adlib has a long history with New York-based Firehouse Productions, providing stacks and racks in UK & Europe on world tours supported by them. One such tour was Radiohead in 2012 with FOH engineer Jim Warren who now works with Florence. Narci Martinez, RHCP and Josh Groban’s production manager, is at the helm as the tour’s production manager.

Adlib’s crew was headed up by senior systems engineer Tony Szabo KSE, with Sam Proctor as second PA Technician and James Petch as stage technician. Szabo and the Adlib team worked closely with systems engineer Mac Olivier Germain to ensure that all Warren’s requirements were met. At the stage end of the arena Ross Anderson supports and coordinates all things stage audio and RF for monitor engineer Jon Ormisher.

A substantial L-Acoustics system was provided by Adlib, with the main PA hangs comprising 12 K1 speakers per side each with six K2 downs; a combination adopted after Warren and Germain found success with the format over the summer festival season and wanted to try it in arenas.

Another slightly unorthodox approach was in flying three eight-deep arrays of K1-SB subs – one either side of the main hangs, plus a centre cluster to even out the sub coverage. Their standard side hangs were 12 L-Acoustics K2s per side, and on the ground, the SB28 subs were arranged in an end-fire format comprising a row of two high and three wide with an identical row directly behind and all set up with critical spacing.

A special formula involving time alignment and phasing made this sub layout ‘extremely directional and functioning far more efficiently than a cardioid system’.

For front fills, they used a selection of ARC2 and KARA enclosures and LA8 amplifiers drove the entire system.

Germain tours his own spec Firehouse control rack, so Adlib modified their Lake Dante Fibre system to incorporate Focusrite D16R RedNet Dante interfaces at FOH to take AES from the control rack to stage using Dante where it was distributed as AES in to the LA8 amplifiers all running at 96k.

“It has been a real privilege to watch a true artist such as Florence, on top of her game in the live arena,” commented client manager Phil Kielty. “We have been lucky to work with Jim Warren on a Radiohead Tour and he really is a great engineer. Narci Martinez and all of his team have put together a stunning production and Marco, Jon, Ross, Jake and everyone involved was so welcoming to us. We look forward to the European Leg and working with everyone again.”

The tour goes to the US and Australia before returning to Europe for the end of the year.

Photo credit: Shirlaine Forrest

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