This summer, on the Florence date of
Sting’s marathon “Back to Bass”
tour (the tour originally started in 2011,
coinciding with the release of two compilation albums commemorating the
25th anniversary of his solo career), the artist and his stellar band
performed at the city’s Cascine Park for an ecstatic sold-out audience, which
was able to enjoy every nuance of Sting’s hits, thanks to an Outline GTO audio rig supplied by Emporio On Stage and helmed by the
artist’s veteran FOH engineer Howard
Page.
Howard Page explained, “The secret
to good live sound is to know your audience, so you make a decision based on
them, and with Sting I look for perfect clarity and definition, tuning the PA
in a very smooth flat way – like studio monitors.”
Another of Page’s secrets lies in
the bottom end: “I want the bass notes to be short and tight. The way to
achieve this is not to bias the PA tuning towards the long end, and not have it
too strong. Many larger line array sound systems have tuning which has a big
boost from the bottom end up to 2000Hz, and then rolls off. Those systems often
lose clarity because of the summation of the instruments, with the mix itself
giving you too much of this frequency range.”
Although it was only the second time
he had worked with the Outline system, Page opined, “It worked great with these
techniques and the settings available enabled me to easily achieve a
smooth natural response across the entire frequency range. The guys have done
an amazing job here. I’d like to pass my thanks to them for their great work on
the settings, and the excellent coverage that the system gave across the entire
venue.”
Regarding the deployment of his
firm’s recently purchased GTO system, Angelo Catoni, owner of rental firm
Emporio On Stage (also the concert’s lighting contractor), “We designed the
sound system together with Outline, and aim at providing the “ideal” system for
various productions’ needs: for example, with Massive Attack, we strengthened
the mid/low range and with Sting we’re looked for a response that was as
natural as possible.
His firm works with a wide variety
of Italian and foreign productions and Catoni confirms excellent feedback
regarding the audio, adding, ”We’re really proud to have an Italian sound
system, with Italian (Powersoft) amplifiers managed by an all-Italian crew!”
Angelo adds, “The first reason I
chose Outline GTO is because I am convinced that it’s at the top, or at
least on a par with other top systems we all know. When I started looking
for a sound system that would enable me to further raise the quality offered by
my company, I heard many different opinions, including a very positive one by a
person I greatly esteem – FOH engineer Andrea Taglia, perhaps among the first
to use and appreciate it, with tenor Andrea Bocelli.”
Outline’s Luca Giaroli continues,
“GTO is now a mature project, thanks to its numerous international
applications, and we now have presets able to ensure PA men and sound engineers
a good starting point. As he expressly told us after the first listening,
Howard Page just balanced the channels (especially sub and bass) according to
the standards the rest of his setup provided, and checked that the alignments
we proposed were to his liking.”
After the
event, confirming that the first feature to look for in a “live” system is
intelligibility, Page said that today GTO is definitely among the systems on
the market that best meet this requirement.
