With Gloria Estefan touring for the first time in five years, her Miami Arena show was always going to be an emotional homecoming. At this, the last concert of the US leg of the tour, Dan Daley spoke to front-of-house mixer Mark Dowdle about his involvement in the design of the show — a process which began three months before they went on the road.

Despite being dwarfed by the 16 musicians surrounding her on the massive stage at one end of the Miami Arena in mid-September, Gloria Estefan was the undisputed focus of attention. She was the focus point of 11,000 pairs of eyes in the huge covered sports stadium (home of the Miami Heat pro basketball team), as well as several million more pairs belonging to HBO subscribers, broadcasters of a tape-delayed telecast of the tour.

To catch Gloria Estefan in Miami, now the international capital of the burgeoning Hispanic music industry, is to see her in her element. "Como esta mi gente?" she asks the largely bilingual crowd. 'How are my people?' — a question that in this instance has far more cultural implications than, say, 'Rock on, Leeds!' The show is a homecoming of the most emotional sort, the end of the US leg of her first tour in five years; the proceeding four shows at this venue were cancelled due to a combination of a sore throat and exhaustion. Estefan was no doubt extremely reluctant to cancel as she already had a heavy touring schedule ahead of her in Europe, and let us not forget that the diminutive, energetic Latino icon seems to thrive on interacting with live audiences. The scheduling of the HBO broadcast to coincide with the tour's end also helped to make many tour-end decisions.

What the crowd heard and saw at the Arena was the result of months of work by Estefan, the band as well as the sound and staging crew, who all worked together in a more integrated manner than is witnessed on many tours. "The thing that's really interesting about this is that I had a lot of input into the stage design," explains Mark Dowdle, FOH Mixer on the show and the head of Clair Brothers' Nashville office, which opened two years ago. "They wanted the sound to really work with the show, so as they developed the show, I was able to work the sound into it."

LOOKING FOR ISOLATION

Dowdle was involved with the tour even before it went out on the road or into rehearsal. That, he says, was critical to how the tour sound turned out. For instance, the positioning and isolation of the drum kit was Dowdle's suggestion. Located on a high riser in the rear of centre stage, the kit is surrounded by a Plexiglass baffle, which helps isolate the kit from the various other percussion and acoustical instruments on stage. "The whole show is designed around audio issues," he says. "I tried to physically position the instruments, like the horns and acoustic guitars, in such a way as to maximize their isolation and increase their definition on a very crowded stage. The background singers are moved off-sides and up stage so that there are no percussion instruments directly behind them. The same goes for the horn section."

Estefan's microphone was also critical, especially in light of the fact that she spends a significant part of the show flying about in a large mechanical globe above the stage and audience. "Gloria likes a hand-held wireless, but she felt that the Samson UR-5D mic we were using was imbalanced, so we had the Audix capsule redesigned by Audix using aircraft aluminum. Details like that make all the difference to the performance." While the globe often carries Estefan out past the Clair Brothers flying array of 72 proprietary front-loaded S4-II cabinets, the tight polar pattern on the mic is sufficient to reject any projected sound into the mic, says Dowdle.

The balance of the main system included Clair's R4-III cabinets underneath the stage wings and four S4 sub cabinets below the centre stage thrust (section of stage which projects forward into audience), with two more on either side of the stage. The centre stage thrust also had several Clair P2 monitors for the front throw. The overall system was designed to address a total of seven sound zones: four in the air (a left and right zone each for both long throw and centre) and three on the floor level, a left and right plus a mono nearfield addressed by the P2 monitors. Speaker control is via Clair's own coherent transfer system. Dowdle monitors the show through headphones, occasionally switching to a pair of Genelec 1031 self-powered speakers.

FOH

The FOH position is centered around a pair of Midas XL4 live sound consoles. With the inclusion of the optional 16 stereo modules and mic pres, this gives Dowdle a total of 128 inputs plus access to Midas' updated snapshot automation. As good as that is, he adds that "there's a lot of fader movement in this show. No matter how well I know the show, every night there's something new to catch. There's a lot of movement on this stage, so that translates into a lot of fader movement."

The monitor mix from the stage side is done on a pair of Yamaha PM4000M mixers, which are feeding Future Sonics' in-ear monitors for most of the band and for Estefan. The actual breakdown is nine sets of in-ear monitors, and five mostly stationary positions, such as the drummer and keyboard players, with Clair Brothers monitor wedges. "The only real issue with the in-ear monitors is that we have to surf the [wireless] channels at each venue to check the channels for them. Otherwise, it's like dealing with any other monitor system."

The size of the band was initially the real issue of the show, as well as the concomitant isolation issues that accompany it. Dowdle has programmed the basics of the show set into the Midas console automation, but acknowledges that each show will still involve a lot of manual fader moves. The reasoning behind this is the lack of a timecode driven system for rhythm on stage, so there's nothing to sync the consoles to except each other. There is, however, a MIDI interface between the console automation and the effects rack, which allows Dowdle to pre-programme many of the effects hits into the automation. Other sound sources from the FOH position, such as pre-show music, are cued manually from a Studer D741 CD deck.

The show is also being recorded constantly, to a combination of DAT, CD-R, and Tascam DA-88 digital eight-track decks. For the live HBO telecast of the Miami show, this was augmented by the addition of Pennsylvania-based Remote Recording Services' Silver Truck, which is equipped with a modified 48-input Neve VR/M main console buttressed by a pair of Studer 900 Series mixers. Together, they handled the 100-plus mic and line inputs that fed the North American broadcast. The stage worked off a pair of isolated Jensen transformers, and Dowdle sent a stereo feed to both the audio and the video trucks as a reference.

ACOUSTICS & EFFECTS

The room sound is always an issue on a tour, and this one, which visited some of the largest venues in each city, was no exception. "You're trying to get the same result in every location, and presets in certain effects systems can help, but everything changes, from humidity to the number of people in the venue from one time to the next," Dowdle explains. "So really what you're doing every time is 'ear-balling' the site as the band sets up and soundchecks, which I feel more secure doing anyway, rather than relying on system presets."

Effects processing equipment included the TC Electronics automated TC 6032 stereo equalizer. This is capable of storing a maximum of 99 memory presets, but Dowdle rarely uses these. In this case, with the Miami Arena nearly full (several hundred empty seats were sightline victims of HBO's seven cameras for the Miami shows, including a robotic camera mounted directly above the FOH position), Dowdle attenuated the midrange frequencies of the system by several dB in the 4-5kHz band. "The room has a bit of bump in that region, which is not unusual for an arena of these dimensions," he explains.

Other processing was handled by six Summit DCL tube compressors, a TC Electronic TC 2290 delay, a pair of Eventide H3500 harmonizers, three TC Electronic M5000 multifunction processors, two Lexicon PCM 80 reverbs, and a pair of Lexicon 480L systems. The 480L, M5000, and 2290 were all used on Estefan's voice, as was a Summit tube compressor. Gating, which was critical with so many microphone positions open, was handled by Valley People PR-10 racks with 14 Kepex Gain Brain IIs.

"Short of doing an entire orchestra on the road, this has been the most complex show I have ever done."

MIC CHOICES

Microphone choices and placement were also considered to be critical. As mentioned earlier, Gloria Estefan's mic required some significant modifications along the way before it was to her satisfaction. But the scores of other microphones on this highly acoustical show were also a concern. "We basically chose microphones on the basis of sound, reliability, and high rejection properties," explains Dowdle. "On the percussion instruments, we use a lot of condenser mics, because they tend to have better rejection characteristics. Rejection is really important because of how many open microphone channels there are in the course of the show. You have the potential for a lot of acoustical bleeding."

As for some specific mic choices, Dowdle used a Shure SM52 on the kick drum, a Shure SM57 on the top of the snare, and an AKG 535 on the bottom; the hat was miked with an AKG 460; the rack toms had EV 408s; a pair of Neumann U87 microphones were set up as a stereo pair about two feet above the cymbals. Guitar amplifiers were tightly miked with Sennheiser MD409s. Countryman DI boxes were used for direct taps into the boards, with the bass guitar using a custom-made DI box from a small company named Evil Twin, which Dowdle describes as being able to "put the bass in your face".

Throughout the night, Gloria Estefan was the only thing in everyone's face, and that's precisely how the 11,000-plus crowd wanted it. While her Miami homecoming was an emotional experience for Estefan and her audience, it also represented the culmination of a gruelling tour that went on the road two months earlier, but had commenced auditions, staging, and rehearsals three months before that.

"The thing about this tour was that it kept growing when it was in the rehearsal stage," recalls Dowdle. "The staging had to keep being rearranged, and during that process, I had to keep integrating the sound system into it as it kept escalating, sorting out the inputs as musicians were added. Short of doing an entire orchestra on the road, this has been the most complex show I have ever done."

In a loading dock at the Miami Arena stood the Silver Truck, the latest in a long line of legendary remote vehicles built and operated by Dave Hewitt, a multiple TEC Award winner for remote work and a bit of legend himself. Hewitt worked with Eric Schilling, Gloria Estefan's Chief Engineer at her Miami recording studio, Crescent Moon, and mixer for the HBO special. Hewitt, assisted by his longtime technician Phil Gitomer, who mans his usual position in the rear of the truck, used a rented pair of Sony 3348 digital multitrack decks, for what would eventually become a home video version of the show, as well as a pair of Sony PCM-800 MDM decks. "The one thing about remote recording is that you rarely get the chance to get it right more than once," says Hewitt. "And redundancy is the price you pay for that."

The Silver Truck has a 48-input Neve VR/M console, with the centre automation and status display section removed to a side rack to allow as many inputs as possible in the console's front-of-truck mounting. It is augmented by a pair of vintage Studer 900 Series consoles, which can also double as stage preamps. Since Crescent Moon recently installed a Capricorn digital console, and the intent was to take the recorded versions of the Miami Arena performances back to the studio for audio post-production, Schilling and co-mixer Bart Chiate used Neve's recently released PC-based software update. This allows format file conversions between the Flying Faders automation on the VR (and other Neve analogue consoles) and the all-digital Capricorn. Being able to recall the fader moves and mutes "would certainly make sifting through all the recordings a whole lot easier, especially if we wind up working under some kind of deadline in the post process back at Crescent Moon," commented Schilling.