Creed's Tour Now Weathered

Pro Sound News February 1, 2003

Last year, Creed seemed to have its share of good and bad luck; on one hand, the group's third album, Weathered, wound up selling 5 million copies, spawning the eighth highest grossing tour of the year, thanks to a $39,200,000 take at the box office. On the other hand, the first leg of that venture was cut short when singer Scott Stapp was in a serious car accident, forcing the band to tack makeup dates onto the second leg of the tour. That extended period on the road then damaged the singer's voice, eventually causing a string of cancelled shows. The cross-country jaunt eventually ended in late December but not before additional Stapp-related drama, more suited for the pages of the National Enquirer than Pro Sound News, reared its head. Nonetheless, despite the difficult times, 2002 was undoubtedly a successful year for the hard-rock band.

And why not? When fans show up at a Creed show, they're not there to gossip-they're there to rock and be rocked, the latter of which is something that the band pulled off on a nightly basis. Aiding and abetting that effort were the band's longtime front-of-house engineer/album co-producer, Kirk Kelsey, and monitor engineer Scott Boculac, along with a passel of gear provided by Clair Brothers Audio Nashville.

For Kelsey, that meant presiding over a Midas XL-4 console: "Yeah, a big 24 inputs from the band but the rest is DAT playback, effects return, stuff like that. It might seem like a low number, but it's still just a 3-piece power trio with a singer-plus I've eliminated a lot of extra stuff over the years, things that just weren't used. For instance, I wasn't using a bass mic-I had a hole in the desk, and it just never came into play. I always relied on the bass DIs, so I eliminated that. I also eliminated all the mics on the guitar rig a few years back-and I was using almost eight AT4050s! Now instead, we use Palmer cabinet simulators to take signal from the preamp of the guitar rig. That way I can get enough level in the PA without having anything roll around."

The effects racks at FOH were likewise relatively simple, featuring a pair of Yamaha SPX990s for vocal processing ("one's for reverb, one's for pitch change, flange distortion, whatever goodies I can throw in"), a TC Electronic 2290 for delay, a TC M5000 on drums and both a TC M2000 and an AMS RMX 16 on Mark Tremonti's guitar. "I'll do most of the guitar effects out in front of house," reported Kelsey. "Basically, he just has his sound out on stage that he really likes to have, then I'll just work with it out front-sometimes it'll be doubled for power or there are solo delays and stuff like that."

Despite all the effects, Kelsey didn't choose to have presets triggered by a MIDI controller. "No, I'm just kind of reaching over and changing things on the fly," he said. "I have a Boss MIDI controller that actually belongs to Ted Leamy [director of JBL Professional's custom shop] which I better give back to him, otherwise he's going to have my head. He actually lent it to me about three years ago; now maybe after this, maybe I should give it back."

As for the sound that Tremonti had on stage, it was an unusual 3-wedge arrangement, with one box providing a monitor mix and a pair of Clair 12AM double 15s pumping out signal straight off the guitar rig. Meanwhile, the rest of the band chose Ultimate Ears personal monitors, with Stapp on UE5s and bassist Brett Hestla on UE7s, each wearing a Shure PSM600 wireless transmitter, while drummer Scott Phillips wore hardwired UE5s and had the added help of a Butt Kicker drum stool shaker. All of the personal monitors were processed through a dbx IEM unit; Boculac explained, "dbx sent one out to me, I worked with it and just running audio through it, turning all the features off, it sounded better. They've added multi-band compression, EQing, etc., and it's really useful when you've got loud personal monitor mixes; you can set the threshold so you're not going to distort any of those little tiny drivers."

While personal monitors provided clear mixes, the vocal sound going into Boculac's Midas Heritage 3000 console was often anything but, as he explained: "The singer likes it pretty loud, so I have a lot of noise filling the main vocal mic from the house. When he sings soft, it might be 50 percent his vocal, 50 percent ambient lead from the house. Then when he sings hard, it's maybe 90 percent his vocal, 10 percent ambient lead-and it goes from a wide-sounding mix to a narrow-sounding mix. I basically use the ambient mics to fill that in on the mixes. I have a pair of mics that I shoot down at the crowd to pick up clapping, and I have a pair of little condensers that pick up the house and reflected sound, a little bit of the PA. When he goes from soft to hard, I'll bring those up, try and blend them in, try to keep that ambient sound consistent in his mix. I basically spend 90 percent of the show listening to him and mixing him."

The vocal mic in question is an Audio-Technica ATW-7373x, which Boculac described as having "a lot less bleed from the sides than all the other mics we've tried. It's a very hi-fi, very smooth-sounding mic; we're really happy with it. Audio-Technica sent us a prototype mic, asked for feedback, and made modifications to it. They've done a lot for us, and we're really happy with their mics."

Kelsey would probably agree with that assessment of the mics, based on his comments about the ones surrounding the drum kit: "We have the new AE2500 dual-element kick-drum mic, and it is awesome. Putting this mic on there immediately added a lot more output to the bottom end of the drum. We also have an AE3000 on the toms, another large-diaphragm condenser and then the hat and ride have AE5100s."

In the end, all that gear and the sound it captures wouldn't mean anything if audiences didn't walk away from the evening's festivities tired but happy, and a large part of that came down to Kelsey's dynamic, dramatic mixes, despite his humble disclaimers. "It's not that intricate of a mix," he said. "It's a power mix, just driving the guitar and vocal back and forth-one or the other is always in front of the mix-and that's pretty much it. It kind of all falls in line with their philosophy-the highest highs and the lowest lows and as far as energy goes, they can go from a ballad to super, in-your-face, heavy metal rock 'n' roll. It's all about dynamics, so I mix it big, fat and loud, but not brash. They just want it to be big and way over the top."

And that's just what they get.

.Clive Young