The Gig.

It took about 3 days in all to travel from my last gig with Jon English at the Frankston Civic Centre in Melbourne to Shania Twains’ home in upstate New York.

It was a long way in every possible sense.

In April ’98, since returning in ’93 from 4 and a half years in London, I was flat strap eking out a living in the music business, based in Sydney – doing everything from singing on jingles, playing guitar on albums, recording, mixing and/or producing albums, and sometimes, all of the above.
If someone hired me for, say, engineering, they often had little or no idea that I worked in a completely different capacity for other people. In fact, I felt the need to have two different business cards. One for the guitar/vocals thing and another for the engineering/production/mixing side – this was my own pre-emptive strike against someone commenting, upon seeing all five pursuits on one card, that earnest and droll Australian incantation, “…wanker”.
But you don’t have to work for very long in the Australian music scene before it dawns on you that the only way to survive is… diversify - and this I had done. I suppose this was problematic in that it meant that I was not really known for doing any one thing particularly well; as they say, jack of all, master on none (well, let’s be fair, I wasn’t really known).
My fellow band-mate from the Billy Thorpe days, Andy Cichon, had moved to New York in ’97 and with great talent, tenacity, lots of hard yards and a smidgeon of luck had secured a place in Shania Twains’ band for her upcoming “Come On Over” tour. He called me in early ’98 as they were auditioning for a guitar player/vocalist to play a few solos, and sing the close two-part harmony stuff with Shania. I would have thought that this type of animal grew on trees in America but, as it turned out, after auditioning for months, they had been through quite a few players and still hadn’t found “Mr. X” as that position had become known.
Now, I have never won anything in my life. Not to say that I have in any way been underprivileged but I have never so much as won a chook raffle. Amazing stuff just didn’t happen to me – it was always someone else. So when I sent off my first demo DAT tape and the most recent video of myself that I could scare up, it was sent after a hail Mary and a nasty $80 international Fedex charge.
With the first show of her tour looming fairly large, the possible scenarios were; Andy would call telling me who the lucky winner was. Or, maybe, he’d call saying “get over here quick…!” – this thought of course immediately followed by my inner monologue ridiculing myself “yeah right, that’s gonna happen…”
And I really didn’t give it much thought after that – I was very busy at home producing 2 recording projects, gigs with Jon (English), cover gigs now and then, and vocal and guitar sessions. But sure enough…
…The phone did ring one April morning. It was Andy saying they had struck out again and if I knew what was good for me I’d pull my finger out and record a couple of specific songs from the ‘COO’ album. He had me put the track in mono on one side, and myself playing and singing on the other.
Once again, I was pretty ambivalent about the idea. As far as I was concerned, this was going to cost more money (another dat – that’s twenty bucks right there…) …international Fedex again…. more film, photos… not to mention mucking around to get this all done – and for what? As I said, this kind of thing never happens to me.
It took a few days for me to get around to pulling some gear together to record, eventually making it to the Fedex office minutes before they closed. That was it. ‘I’d given it a good go…. at least I’d had a shot’. I was consoling myself before the tape had even left the country.
Us Aussies just aren’t born with the same sense of self-confidence that your average American seems comfortable with. What is strength to them is arrogance to us. Often in Americans, it seems there’s an unquestioned sense of self-assurance – to us, we only get there after years of therapy to fighting thru the innate Australian sense of inferiority. Anyway…
So it was that I received a call from George Travis, the tour director. He gave me some basic info on what he called, “the little project” he had going, and said that Mutt Lange, Shania’s husband and producer, had some specific musical questions he’d like to ask me. Mutt called about 10 minutes later and, frankly, I was in a pretty weird zone.
I mean, who in Australian music doesn’t know his production masterpiece, ‘Back in Black’? You can’t have played at the Sylvania Hotel, the Comb & Cutter or the Manzil Room in the ‘80’s without a veritable reverence for that recording. It represented the pinnacle of what Australian pub-rock could become. If you were sitting in a band room, not having a great night, or a great gig, all you needed was to hear the staunch, immovable first 6 chords of “Shook me all night long…”, and you were reminded of why you were doing what you were doing. Every song on that record is raw and visceral, and at the same time, elegant and beautiful.
Anyway, he had me sing a few things over the phone just to make sure it really was me who was singing on the tape. He checked my range on a couple of things and had me jump through a few more vocal hoops – and that was it. George gets back on the phone and says, “can you leave tomorrow?”
“Umm, no…. I’m playing with a band here and I can’t just bail on them …I could leave in a few days after we work in a replacement - maybe a week”. He told me if that ware the case, he’d be trying out a couple of other contenders in the meantime – but I know George now, and he was just trying to put the screws on.

I left about 10 days later - as it turned out, Anzac Day ’98.

The Crew.

Having been chief FOH engineer on the “Come On Over” (COO) Tour in ’98-’99, Nigel Green, who has worked closely with Mutt on many projects, knew what was expected, i.e., pretty close to perfection. With this in mind, there were a few things he wanted to do differently this time around. Naturally, with the PA being as fundamental as it is, Nigel started researching the issue months before rehearsals began. The aim was to find a State-of-the-Art PA system, able to produce “Hi-Fi” sound, in arenas that invariably define an acoustic nightmare. After considerable consultation, the I4 line array system from Clair Bros. was settled on.

Another fundamental decision made early on was to set up the show ‘in-the-round’. There were two reasons for this: 1/. The boss wanted to get close to the crowd, and so having a round, or as it turned out, oval, stage in the middle of the room, a mere 1 metre or so high meant she was able to get up close and personal with the punters, and 2/. Nigel and Mutt were unhappy acoustically with the gun-barrel effect of most arenas. Having the stage and PA set up one end of the room, shooting down toward the other end meant that anyone halfway or further back was hearing more reflected noise than direct – so by placing the stage in the centre of the arena, it reduced that distance of PA to Punter (the PTP quotient?) from, say, 65mts to 25mts. It also increased the PA requirements compared to what you might normally require in such environments by a factor of roughly 1.5. We essentially use 4 PA’s each facing north, south, east and west, as it were, from the centre of the stage. An added bonus of this stage configuration is that in such large rooms, normally seating 15 to 20k people, there’s hardly a bad seat in the house.

When it came to guitars, Nigel had become insecure about the vagaries of mic positioning, cabinet voicing and speaker condition. He wanted the PA speaker system to be the only speaker system. This insecurity heralded the first use of the term ‘DI’ – , yes, DI – the natural enemy of the guitar. I have no doubt that when Nigel informed me of this particular development I regarded him as one might a nasty and virulent rash appearing on ones nether regions. He insisted that this would also eliminate the problem of inordinately high guitar levels here and there, where db’s were ricocheting around seating areas from the cabinets themselves - usually placed behind the stage facing backward. Problem? …problem?? I assured Nigel that ‘too much guitar is barely enough’. He didn’t agree.

This ‘DI’ thing added a dimension to the tour that, frankly, had become disturbing. We had to make everything sound exactly as it did on the last tour but without any speakers or mic’s - and then add a pile of new stuff for the “Up!” album sounds. Yeah, no worries.
Nigel had had some reasonably successful (just a bit) studio experience with Def Leppard involving Palmer speaker simulators and he assured me that they faithfully delivered true amp tone. Yeah, whatever Nige.

The Band.

To a degree, the band’s work had already begun on a few songs back in late 2002. During promotion for the album we had some live TV stuff to do & simply for reasons of convenience, and because we hadn’t actually begun any of the process mentioned above, all we used were Pod XT’s. Preparing for the Letterman show, we spent a lot of time in a rehearsal studio in NY programming sounds as closely as we could to the “Getcha Good” tracks, and rehearsing it so that we played it something like close to the CD.

We’d played on these shows before and were aware of the super-limited setup time – pretty much two run-through’s and that’s it. So, Nigel’s idea, being the sonic boy scout he is, was to set up TC Electronics programmable eq’s (1128’s) on the back of the Pods (and pretty much everything), using the eq’s almost as channel strips, programming in level changes and eq. He’d already set levels on our background vocals which were all going into a ProTools rig, compressed and eq’d them so we just gave the studio stereo BGV’s. When we walked into the studio he said to them “Okay, just zero all the faders, zero all the eq, and it’ll be perfect… “ It blew them away that when their console was zeroed, it sounded like the record!

Afterwards, it was quietly pleasing to hear that some of the house band had thought it amazing that we had been allowed to mime on the show because they hadn’t seen any amps anywhere (no-one mimes on Letterman). There were, however, 4 Pods lined up at the back of the stage area on tom stands. The crew assured them later, long after we were gone, that it was in fact, absolutely live. We did the same thing on Leno a month later with the next single, “Up!”.
The Tour.

All this aside, actual tour preparation started with being sent the stems of the new album (for the ProTools uninitiated, these are the computer files of the ProTools tracks). Using those tracks as reference on our home systems, guitar parts were divided up and we began thinking about guitar rigs that would incorporate the gear used on the last tour, as well as what would be needed for the new sounds.

For my part, I spent 6 weeks in LA in April/May 2003 pulling all of these threads together. Firstly pulling together all the old gear, then adding bits and pieces as required. The rig for the old tour was, to put it mildly, basic. All I used for the first half of the tour was a Boss GT-5 straight into a pair of Matchless HC-30 heads, through a pair of Fender 2 x 12 cabinets. Easy. (Later I added a TC G-Force just for time-based effects.)

I still think the GT-5 is one of the most underrated pieces of gear out there. Before I ever bought my first one of these great units (I’ve used them for a long time) I wanted to make sure that the dirt that I got out of it was going to work – but every time I’d ever tried one of the “all-in-one” units, the distortion/overdrive components seemed to have corners cut all over the place, and were never a patch on the small pedals that they were meant to emulate. I had been using a Boss ‘Blues Driver’ into my Marshall Plexi back around ’97 when I was first looking at this unit, and I wasn’t going to buy any “all-in-one” that didn’t sound at least as good as this.
The GT-5 was meant to have the same circuitry built into it so I was keen to check it out. After some messing around, I was actually able to get the GT-5 sounding better than the pedal alone – and that was only using the “blues” setting in the ‘Distortion/overdrive’ module, no eq, no compression. I’ve been sold on the unit ever since. SO good for an “all-in-one” – I’m amazed it never caught on in any huge way. Am I wrong or are us guitar-players ‘midi-phobes’?
I’ve always liked the sound of real amps. Pre/power amp setups have almost always sounded synthetic to me. So this was a way of achieving authenticity, while having a pretty comprehensive level of programmability and flexibility.
With this in mind, it has been important to run the amps clean, and achieve the gain from the GT-5 - the stuff with Shania requires lots of both. This clearly meant that any dirt-box I used had to be authentic.
For the “Up!” tour I added a TC Electronics G-Major, the Line 6 Echo-Pro, Mod-Pro and Stomp-box modeler. I also had to add my old favourite (and now discontinued) Dimension C pedal.
All these units were combined using a Ground Control Pro switching system by Digital Music. This, with its sibling patching unit, the GCX, is a solidly built, reliable unit with 8 switchable loops, midi in and out and a separate ‘clean’ out to a tuner. I had 4 of the 8 loops switched to stereo loops, involving an extra $100 to swap one of the PCB’s. Pretty simple.
That was it except for the addition of those nasty necessities, the speaker emulators.

So, by the 3rd week in LA we had begun clawing back to where we were during the last tour, comparing live recorded tracks to the same gear set up, but using the Palmer simulators.

D.I.’s!

Apparently the unit of choice by those in the know is the Palmer ADIG-LB’s – an acronym meaning Analog Direct Input for Guitar (with Load Box). We’d found a few of these and thrown them on the back of our amps, in place of the speaker cab’s. Because these units have a built-in dummy load, it’s not necessary to use any speaker cabinet at all, although you can plug a cabinet into the unit if you want to, essentially putting the unit in the speaker line. Taking a mic cable and slamming the signal straight into a mixer was of course the acid test. This is something I’ve done on many occasions in the past with results ranging from embarrassing to hideous, but this time, yes, the boffins were right… it sounded like an amp – it sounded exactly like the amp would and should – amazing!

Nigel had dumped the tracks from a show we recorded on the last tour into ProTools as a reference. It took minimal tweaking with the Palmers and we were pretty much back to square one. Brilliant. Nigel had arranged a stack of TC midi-programmable equalizers again – so that any deficiency we found was tweaked back in with them, and that EQ preset was recalled by the Ground Control with the rest of the patch.

Palmer also make a stereo unit but it doesn’t incorporate a dummy load so this unit would essentially function as mic replacement- still requiring speaker cabinets. Brad Madix, who has been on the tour with us until very recently has been FOH engineer for Def Leppard for many years and he has gone about trying every cabinet/mic combination, determined to find one that outdid the Palmers – he’s still looking. He says the Palmers always sounded bigger, truer and, in his words “they captured the entire guitar sound”. I agree and now I love the things – it would take a lot for me to soil the house sound with huge stage volume now that I know it’s not necessary.

As we progressed to the sounds on the new album, Nigel had the whole thing in PT and was able to play a mix pretty close to the CD. As I played, he’d A/B back and forth from mine to the ‘real’ one and we tweaked until we couldn’t tell which was which.

I've got to say also, that using the TC programmable eq’s was a very handy way of equalizing patch levels. My rig being so rudimentary in principle (i.e., guitar>effects>amp), meant that high gain sounds were just going to be intrinsically louder than clean tones – so running them all into the eq’s, which provide about +/- 9db of gain, meant we were able to program in level changes from part to part, including level boosts for solos. So, to a degree, the guitars mixed themselves.

It was at that stage, after weeks of programming in a rehearsal room, that Dan Braun, production liaison for Shania’s management company, Q-Prime, stuck his head into the rehearsal room one day and mused, “I didn’t know it was going to be a NASA project…” And it was by any measure, a pretty elaborate setup. Christine Aguilera’s band were rehearsing next door and they would drop in daily and wonder what on earth was going on – they couldn’t understand why, day after day, we weren’t actually playing together as a band. Were we meant to be rehearsing or making a record?

Eventually we all made it through the process, and then moved from Burbank to another, larger facility in Hollywood, so that we could actually play together with a small version of the PA that we would use for the tour. This was indispensably valuable.
As a touring guitar player in Australia, I have been told a million and one times to turn down, “so we can get the guitar in the system” only to listen to desk tapes afterwards with the guitar mysteriously absent (“it was still really loud off the stage mate, …. really”). I loved the opportunity to listen to exactly what my guitar sounded like thru the system, every sound and tone; and it turned out that, while many were fine, some of the sounds we’d programmed had to be modified for the ‘live’ experience, with perhaps less “hi-fi” top end than seemed right on the studio monitors, bit more gain here, too much there, bit tubby here…. With close to 60 patches to check, this was invaluable.
In terms of hearing the guitar on the infamous desk tape, Mutt has always been extremely particular about the mix (understatement of the year) and the FOH crew knows they have to have any feature parts and solos up and in your face from the first moment. And being completely speakerless, you can imagine, we are at their mercy….
After all, is there anything more embarrassing than launching into a solo, striking your very best rock-god pose while standing out near the front of the PA, knowing that people are down there saying “... wanker” – ‘cause they can’t hear a note you’re supposedly playing - whereas, if they could actually hear what you were playing, they would be so stunned by the innate virtuosity that any thoughts of your personal self-aggrandizement would be banished from their minds forthwith. Hmmm….

That brings me to the next interesting aspect of this gig I have had to get used to – it almost goes without saying that the only vehicle we have for hearing anything is in-ear monitoring. I am often asked when back in Oz what it’s like using these things. Naturally, bottom end is an issue - in that there is none. Anything below 200 Hz is pretty much absent – just the right crossover point to lose any fatness a guitar sound might embody. It seems to me that if you can get the guitar sounding halfway decent in a pair of these things, then it’s gonna sound fabulous through the PA in the room. But what can you expect from drivers that are smaller than a centimeter across? I very often leave the left one out just so that I can hear the PA in the room, while still having the fast signal in my right ear – usually this is enough to stay in time. The actual monitors we have are molded to fit the ear of course, but also have small ports in them into which you can fit rubber grommets that either fill the port completely (no ambiance at all) or leave a big hole allowing quite a bit of the house sound to bleed through. I now have the ones with the big hole and find that it helps with hearing ambiance and getting some kind of vibe from the crowd The only other deficit in using these things is the feeling of disembodiment from everyone you are playing with. A bit like playing in an isolation room in a studio. This is the nature of the beast and something you become accustomed to.

However, aside from these limitations, in-ear monitoring has changed the way I play and I wouldn’t go back… ever. I remember back in the day listening to desk tapes so often in horror thinking, “wow, it didn’t sound like that to me…” These things have made me play more accurately, and feel far more in control of what is going on, so that now, when I hear desk tapes (usually desk MP3’s these days) I am almost always pleasantly surprised rather than grimly appalled. This is a good thing.

Shania has always put a lot of emphasis on performance – play to the crowd. Seems to me that they are ones paying the bills – so standing there looking at the neck of your guitar will not cut it. To that end, we decided to have Cory’s (fiddle/guitar player) ProTools rig change all the guitar players’ patches, freeing us to roam wherever, whenever. This has fundamentally changed how the show looks because it means that we don’t have to be anywhere near our own ‘station’ at anytime, other than for volume or wah pedal moments. The stage is football shaped (Australian football, in fact, a St.Kilda Australian football), and measures about 30 mts from end to end – so we often find ourselves nowhere near our pedals, and, since we don’t need to be, this has now been written into the loose choreography of the show.
Many were skeptical when we set about doing this, wondering what was going to happen when the computer went down – well, it’s been about 100 shows now and it’s gone down once – and that was during the last song of the night…. touch wood. You may also think it’s unnecessarily frivolous, but, it’s a bit like traveling in business class – I don’t do it often, but when I do I find myself thinking, ‘man, I could get used to this’. And I have – I LOVE it. This, along with the wireless units (a whole discussion in itself, but in our case, Sennheiser), gives us unprecedented freedom to concentrate fully on putting on a show – which after all, is what it is all about.

These last 6 years of touring have been an amazing adventure requiring several circumnavigations of the globe, and on each of my many trips back home, the local music industry appeared to be falling into a deeper and darker state of decay. I’m sure the reasons for this are multifarious and interdependent, and there’s always fact woven with opinion, a bit like politics or religion – way too much for this space. However, the #1 difference between the 2 sides of the Pacific is simply sheer size. In some ways, we grow up in Australia with an inbuilt sense of inferiority beside our Nth American colleagues. However, in my years observing the music scene here I haven’t witnessed any huge leap in quality, as much as quantity. There's so much – lots of good stuff, and more of the mediocre. I guess all we see in Australia is the better stuff that makes it through the oceanic filter, just as someone from here in the US seeing only INXS, Crowded House, AC/DC, Divynals, Midnight Oil, Kylie, Natalie Imbruglia, Silverchair, and Jet would be misguided to think we don’t have our fair share of the spectacularly ordinary on our side of the pond.
Seems that the major advantage of the larger dimension of things in America is that one can appeal to a minority and still make a reasonable living as a musician. There are many bands who have strong regional followings, that occasionally grab some mainstream radio success with a single, only to settle back into the “where are they now” file…and still do pretty well by Australian standards. I mean, Air Supply and the Little River Band are still touring in the US, unbeknown to the mainstream Australian public.

One question I am consistently asked when I get home concerns the average day on the road. We travel by bus pretty much everywhere – and it’s a bit of an improvement on the average Tarago! It’s a far more attractive option than flying, which over here these days is nothing short of harrowing. You can check out the itiniery on pretty much any Shania website – and from that you can see the distances traveled… never more than 3 shows in a row.
The crew load in at 9am and 2 hours after the last chord of the show is heard, you can shoot a cannon through the arena. That’s 12 x 53’ semi-trailers packed with everything from staging, lighting, band gear, to 3 complete offices, with photocopiers, faxes, shredders, a complete kitchen with road-cased ovens, crockery, cutlery and masses of food to feed the cast & crew breakfast & lunch and everyone dinner. The caterers spend around $5000 USD a day on groceries, and of the 7 catering crew, 3 are Kiwis, 2 are Aussies, one Sth. African and one Mexican. We have crew from the UK also and since the last tour in 98-99, 3 Americans have moved to Australia. When we have, say, a week off, as we did recently, everyone disperses to the 4 winds, to return a week later, jet-lagged but refreshed and happier for having been home.

Another question I’m consistently asked is, “It must be amazing standing behind her on the stage!” Naturally, being a happily married man, I haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about.

An Average Day.

An average day on this tour:

2.15pm Have bags in our room ready to be picked up by bellman.
2.45pm Leave hotel for the gig.
4.30pm Sound check
5.30pm Dinner
7.30pm Support starts
8.30pm Show
10.30pm Finish
11.30pm Leave on the bus for the next city – usually between 3 and 10 hours drive.

If we get to the hotel in the middle of the night, we usually have to get up and head in rather than stay asleep on the bus since we are not usually allowed to run bus generators, required for power/Air conditioning etc, in city streets – most of us usually sleep better in a real bed anyway – even though the bunks on the buses are very comfortable.
Mornings are usually for relaxation, working out in the gym of the hotel, reading, practicing and taking care of business back home, which of course goes on even if we are out of town. Three cheers for the internet.

During days off, and any other spare moment I can find, I have been working on my own recording project and hope to have it out before the end of the year. This will be my first “studio” recording in 18 years and I’m pretty excited about it. To do this, I’ve set up a suitcase recording studio which is reasonably unique and allows me to do just about anything I need to do except mix. It incorporates:

Amek 9098 dual mic pre
Roland VX 5080
Midiman Midi Sport 2x2 midi interface
Apogee Mini Me audio interface (for use with Logic)
ProTools M Box
Other World Computing firewire drive
Pod XT
M-Audio Oxygen mini keyboard
Macally extended computer keyboard
Mackie 1202 mixer
ATM 4050 mic
assorted cabling.
I monitor on a pair Bose noise-canceling headphones which rule, and a pair of Cambridge mini speakers with sub.