myMix personal monitoring systems played a key role when Pete Tong recently embarked on a run of dates to perform his anthemic Ibiza Classics with the 65-piece Heritage Orchestra conducted by Jules Buckley.

Jessie Ware was one of the guest vocalists, along with Ella Eyre and John Newman both performing their Rudimental collaborations. They were also joined by Candi Staton who sang You Got The Love some 30 years on from its original release.

While recording and mixing dance and classical genres has become popular, there are some major considerations when heading out on the road, not least the ability to offer a large number of musicians their own monitor mix, which is the primary reason that myMix was chosen for the tour, according to the brand’s UK distributor Synthax Audio (UK) and the tour’s all-Dutch audio team of Next Level Audio’s Fred den Dulk (system designer), Ron Peeters (monitors) and Tom Gelissen (FOH).

Peeters, who is the regular monitor engineer for the Heritage Orchestra, commented: “We were looking for a hard wired monitor system which was able to handle sufficient inputs to have at least the ability to give every musician a direct out of their own mic or a blend of both mics on one instrument, so they were able to control their own level in their mix. So, the main purpose of our search was to find a system that could handle that many inputs. myMix is unique in this way because it gave us the required 54 stage mic inputs/direct outs and 30 channels of sub-mixes and there are no other systems that can handle this many channels.”

Synthax UK believes this to be the largest myMix deployment ever in the UK, and probably one of the biggest ever in Europe.

The orchestra were fed a number of sub-mixes (Pete Tong, strings, brass, band, etc.) to their myMix mixers with the section leader and their own instruments made available on separate channels. The mixers were attached to their seats using a K&M microphone bar – allowing for quick and easy access – and were then networked using eight Cisco switchers spread around the stage. To get the three monitor 96kHz 32-channel MADI output streams onto the myMix network they simply converted the MADI from 96kHz to 48kHz and then used two RME ADI-648 interfaces to convert the MADI to ADAT, which was in turn fed into a rack of six myMix IEX-16L-A expanders at the monitor position.

With three concerts over three consecutive nights in Birmingham, London and Manchester, rig time was important. “We are able to have all the myMix mixers set up and have the system running in less than an hour. It’s so easy and it just works,“ den Dulk explained. “I had given the orchestra members just a five-minute overview of the myMixes, and we didn’t get any questions. All these classical musicians were just able to use it straight away with no problem.” 

Peeters added: “When I first saw the myMix system eight or nine years ago it was a fairly simple system, so it didn’t trigger our interest at the time. But now it is able to handle so many input channels, it is perfect for our requirement. To be honest, myMix is one of the best personal monitoring systems that I have ever heard, because its sound quality is really good too.”

http://www.mymixaudio.com
http://www.synthax.co.uk