BAND: Eric Clapton
VENUE: Wembley Arena
DATE: Monday, March 4
PA: Showco/TFA

So anyway, enough about Deevoy's wilful and malicious nature; back to the issue at hand: it was around three years ago now when Samuelsons Film and Lighting started looking to expand. They'd got about as big as they could within their field of primary concern — camera, lighting and other plant hire for the TV and film industry, and so in addition to such trifles as building multi-million dollar ship simulators for Japan, they started taking over other large organisations in parallel industries. By 1984, these included the already huge Zenith Lighting, the European rental agency for Varilites and 75% of the plant owning part of Theatre Projects, which included TFA Sound Hire.

Around November last year, with a rather dilapidated TFA in the bag, they approached Mike Lowe of Turbosound to breathe a little life back into the organisation. Mike donned his shrewd businessman's headwear, and proceeded to construct a deal whereby he ran both TFA and Turbosound side-by-side. This gave Samuelsons the benefit of Mike's aforementioned shrewdness, whilst providing Turbosound with the immense backing of a giant corporation. For want of a better idea, the phone is now being answered 'TFA/Turbosound', but this may change as the TFA operation is re-structured. Turbosound retain full control over their own operation. It's a significant merger, and should strengthen Turbosound's chances of keeping up with the escalating world demand for their rigs.

European Legs

For the European leg of the Clapton tour, TFA were supplying the main FOH speaker/amp system, with the front end and foldback being brought over by the US operation Showco.

A little over two years ago, TFA brought out their C3 System which was unusual (and still is) for its exclusive use of tubes for loading the HF compression drivers. They exhibited acoustical characteristics similar to a 120 degree flare, but had the important advantage of greater physical compactness: they're only about 6" long and have an internal diameter of about 1".

Last summer the system was compacted so that a complete 'unit' now consists of a bass bin containing 4 x EV 15's, and a mid/hi unit of the same size containing 2 x (3x EV 12's) and 4 EV DH1506 compression drivers loaded mainly with tubes, plus a couple of 60 degree flares on the inside, stage level stacks, to keep feed back to a minimum. 12 stacks per side were flown, and six were at stage level, all driven via BSS crossovers by a combination of RSD MOSFET1000's and Quad 405's for the HF.

The sound on Monday night was quite good where I was sitting, but as my ticket didn't allow me to stroll about much I can't vouch for the rest of the place. Until there's some quantum leap in high powered sound reinforcement, pumping tens of thousands of watts of programme into a giant metal and concrete bunker like the Arena will never produce really hi fidelity. End of chat.

Showco

Showco were using a modified Harrison SM5 26:5:2 foldback mixer for FOH, and a second one for foldback. FOH engineer, Mike Ponczek, saw to it that the groups were used thus:

1 — Bass drum, snare and hi hat
2&3 — The rest of the kit in stereo
4 — Bass guitar
5&6 — Guitars in stereo
7&8 — Keyboards in stereo

That's the first time I've seen that use of three groups for the kit, but I guess it does make sense for a band that relies so much on the straight, driving rhythm supplied by the components of group one. The effects and EC's voice went straight to the stereo masters.

Predictably there was no flashy array of auxiliary effects units, but the three auxiliary sends used fed the following:

1. Prime Time Delay — used in stereo exclusively for guitar; mostly repeats.
2. Super Prime Time — a programmable delay used mostly for EC's voice, and occasionally guitar.
3. Lexicon 224XL — A high quality digital reverb system used on more or less everything for general reverb, with particular emphasis on the kit.

What was a little surprising was the extensive use of gates and compressors. Two dbx racks contained a total of eight model 904 gates and eight 903 compressors. All the vocals (Eric's and the two backing singers) were gated and then compressed. In the case of Eric's mike, the setting of the gate was a case for continual monitoring, because, since moving the kit from its original position to one side of the stage, info a central spot directly behind him, the cymbals were tending to trigger his mike inadvertently. I'm sure Mike would have tried this, but for the less experienced engineers among you, there follows a little IM&RW PA Col, free, friendly advice: one way to get around this would be to use the gate's key input with an HF roll-off, thus diminishing the effective trigger signal level from the cymbals. The same sort of process can be used to separate snares from hi hats, etc.

The kick drum was also gated and then limited, whilst the bass guitar was simply limited, as was the keyboard effects send which was being sent up from the onstage keys mixer. A pair of Klark Teknik DN27's were used in conjunction with a DN60 analyser for overall system correction.

Jamie Oldaker played a Yamaha 9000 series kit, which was augmented by a couple of SDS7 Simmons pads and was transduced via the following:

Bass Drum: EV RE20
Snare: SM57
Hi Hat: SM57
Rack Toms: Shure 54 (old dynamic model)
Floor Tom: Sennheiser 421
O/Hs: 2xSM81's

Duck Dunn, who used to play bass for the Blues Brothers, was DI'd and his feed was also sent to an input on the keyboard mixer so that the keyboard player, Chris Stainton, could vary the amount of bass he heard through his stack. Chris played a Kawai electric grand, a DX-7, a PPG Wave 2.2 and a Hammond B3/C3 which had been converted to all-solid state and fitted into a custom built flightcase. These all went through a Boss BX600 mini-mixer before being both DI'd up to the FOH desk and sent through a Yamaha A4 115H powered 1x15 plus horn system plus a Leslie for on-stage monitoring.

Tim Renwick played second guitar — a Fender Strat through one of the new Roland rack-mounting stereo Super Chorus units, which the lads rated very highly.

The two outputs of the chorus were put through a Marshall 800 Series with a 50watt head and two 4x12's, plus a Music Man 2x12 combo. Two SM57 plus a DI took the signals FOH.

Apart from an occasional 1960 sunburst Les Paul, Eric sticks to Strats, although not always of the Fender variety. He has one Sapphire blue model made by Roger Griffin, which he uses for slide work, a black Fender for normal tuning and an old brown Fender for open A tuning. He used very little in the way of effects (the occasional dash of chorus or delay) and it is the Marshall 800 Series stack that is the basis of his sound. For the keen Eric emulators, the man uses Ernie Ball Regular Slinky strings, and Ernie Ball hard picks.

EC

I was into my sister's copy of Disraeli Gears before I was into long pants, and Sunshine of Your Love provided one of my first introductions to the all-important concept of The Riff. What with riffs, reefers and learning how to take cigarettes down properly, pre-teen suburban life held its fair share of challenges.

Though he was soon to be partially eclipsed by Emerson (Keith) and Wakeman (Dick — and I mean that), Eric Clapton was, for me, a star of such keen brightness in that good ol' Rock and Roll firmament, that it is now rather hard to say a word against the chap. This man had the licks before any other. While the rest were still sliding an amateurish finger vaguely up and down the fretboards of their semi's, producing litle more than major scales, EC was unquestionably a purveyor of The Veritable Business. We were talking, in the hushed and breathy tones of the amazed and overawed, Fuzztone, Feedback and Single-Note Solos.

Since the early seventies Eric has come up with a few classics such as Layla, and Wonderful Tonight, plus a whole bagful of 12-bar variations lyrically re-working the same old boy/girl emotional trauma motifs and myths about the hipness of the Rock and Roll lifestyle that have sat mindlessly and lifelessly in the grooves of R&B/Rock albums for eons. Given that Eric is far more a musician than a lyricist, maybe the words aren't so important. He's undoubtedly a master of the classic Blues/Rock guitar, and few people could fail to respond to that — for a couple of numbers, at least. Then it starts to wear a little thin. Then it starts to get a little repetitive and tedious: the same sounds, the same riffs, the same rhythms. Before the first hour was upon Monday night, I was screaming for some spark of newness; an interesting melody line: an unusual progression. Anyone who's ever learned a few blues licks will know that trotting them out again over a variety of 12-bar patterns can be done with little effort. Whether we were listening to the originator or not, it was all rather tired.