Pete Tong recently embarked on a series of Ibiza Classics live performances that took in the London O2 Arena, Manchester Arena and Glasgow Hydro. The gigs saw the DJ joined by the 65-piece Heritage Orchestra conducted by Jules Buckley, and vocalists Jessie Ware, and Ella Eyre and John Newman performing selected tracks from their drum-and-bass collaboration as UK band Rudimental.
Taking dance music to a new level of live performance involved new thinking… and the discovery of MyMix Audio.
‘We were looking for a hard-wired monitor system with sufficient inputs 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,’ says Ron Peeters, regular monitor engineer for the Heritage Orchestra. ‘The myMix system is unique in this way, because it gave us the required 54 stage mic inputs/direct outs and 30 channels of submixes and there are no other systems that can handle this many channels.’
The orchestra were fed a number of sub-mixes – Pete Tong, strings, brass, band – to their myMix mixers, with the section leader and their own instruments available on separate channels. The myMix mixers were attached to the orchestra’s seating using a K&M microphone bar, giving quick and easy access. All the mixers were networked using eight Cisco switches spread around the stage. To get the three 32-channel 96kHz Madi output streams used for monitoring onto the myMix network, Madi audio was converted from 96kHz to 48kHz and two RME ADI-648s interfaces converted the Madi to Adat, which fed a rack of six myMix IEX-16L-A expanders at the monitor position.
With the three concerts staged over three consecutive nights in Birmingham, London and Manchester, rigging 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.’ Peeters explains. ‘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 able to use it straight away with no problem.’
Peeters believes that myMix has proved itself: ‘To be honest, myMix is one of the best personal monitoring systems that I have ever heard, because its sound quality is really good.’
Ibiza Classics is set to return to the same venues in December 2017.
More: www.mymixaudio.com
