Counting more than 50 years making music, The Bellamy Brothers and their band currently play around 150 shows a year and are about to embark on a six-week stint on Blake Shelton’s Friends and Heroes 2019 tour. Recently, tour manager Tim Thomas sold the Danley SM80F loudspeaker system that had served the Brothers’ shows via his production and installation firm Show Pro to a club owner – making way for a larger, more modular system.

‘We always travelled with a pair of Danley SM80Fs, which integrate a subwoofer into the full-range SM80, but I didn’t pull them out if the contract was paying someone else for production,’ Thomas explains. ‘That was the case at a show in Kansas – I was promised a state-of-the-art FOH system, but since this wasn’t my first time at the rodeo I was sceptical. The logistics worked out that we didn’t have long to set up before doors, and the system was terrible. It didn’t take long to realise that no amount of processing was going to improve the situation, so I brought in the SM80Fs.

‘We mounted them on some road cases, and I already had my Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifier in the rack, so we fired up. They sounded phenomenal like always, and everyone in the room – including the owner – recognised the sonic gulf between the house system and the Danleys. At the end of the night, he offered to buy them right then and there. Since I already had plans to shake up my Danley rig, I went for it.’

Thomas now travels with a pair of Danley SH96HO full-range loudspeakers, complemented by a pair of TH118XL subwoofers and two four-channel DNA 20k4 Pro amplifiers with onboard DSP. That rig covers him for large outdoor events, and it will really cover him for those events when he adds a planned four more TH118XL subwoofers. For the 1,000 to 3,000-person venues that the SM80Fs so suit, Thomas now has a pair of SM80s (no built-in sub) that he can pair with the TH118XLs. In addition, the SM80s will serve as side fills for large outdoor shows.

Coincident with, but unrelated to the FOH turnover, Thomas talked the Bellamys into Danley SM80M wedges…

‘They were fine with their old monitors of thirteen years, but I always had to run parametric and graphic EQs to get them close to decent,’ Thomas says. ‘They only ever let me know if things were really terrible. Nevertheless, I thought, sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing, and gave them the Danleys. From my end, it was way easier – I didn’t have to EQ much at all, just a dip around 2kHz to tailor it to what I know they like. So, when the show started, it was obvious that both of the brothers were really into the performance.

‘They were having even more fun than they usually do, and they were getting way into their singing. I suspected it was the monitors, and sure enough, back in the green room afterwards, they confirmed it. They were blown away by the definition of the rest of the band and their vocals. So now the crowd is happy, the brothers are happy and I’m happy. Spoiled really.’