Shaped Music

Description

Tour Has Sunshine Day Ft. Collins, CO (September 16, 2002)--Shaped Music recently handled audio duties for perhaps the most eclectic tour of the summer, Unlimited Sunshine, which featured acts like Cake, The Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, De La Soul and Kinky. "The point of the tour was to have diverse musical offerings," reported Shaped Music's Rich Werdes. "Since they were different styles of music, they had vastly different stage setups. It was a testament to planning and digital consoles." The digital desks in question were a pair of Innova-Son Grand Live digital mixing consoles, one each at front of house and monitors. "We decided to use the Innova-Son consoles for quick changeovers," Werdes noted. "The fact that the Innova-Son has input matrixing within the software meant that we could have a separate sub-snake for each act, pop that in, and those inputs would show up on the appropriate inputs on the console. Plus, all the settings for the gates and compressors are stored." Peter George, FOH systems technician on the tour, added, "It was either that or carry around half a truck of analog consoles." George, a veteran of the road and studio, had not used an Innova-Son console previously, but says that he was up and running in no time. "In four hours, I had all six bands programmed in, and I never even cracked the manual. This board is pretty intuitive. We've been really comfortable on this tour--on schedule and on time, every changeover, every day. For a tour like this, where you want to run six bands, there's no question that this is the way to go. We even threw the 'betweener' act some extra time. Why play a CD when these guys can get the kids going?" Innova-Son www.innovason.com String Cheese Incident CANDACE HORGAN Mix, Mar 1, 2001 Blending bluegrass, reggae, jazz, blues and straight-ahead rock 'n' roll into their own unique musical stew, Colorado's String Cheese Incident has, in a few short years, risen to the upper tier of the jam-band echelon. As recently as 1999, the band was playing the 600-seat Fox Theater in Boulder, but in 2000, the band headlined a show at Red Rocks for a near sold-out crowd. Constant touring and a slot on the 1999 Summer Sessions tour with former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh has let fans across the country in on the secret that Coloradans had tried to keep for over five years. String Cheese Incident is made up of mandolinist/fiddler Michael Kang, acoustic guitarist Bill Nershi, bassist Keith Moseley, keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth and drummer Michael Travis. The musical hopscotch the band performs every night keeps soundman Jon O'Leary working hard. "It is difficult to be perfect every single night, because we change so much from genre to genre in each song," says O'Leary. "Every song needs to be mixed differently. When we go from reggae to bluegrass, I have to redo my whole mix, and they genre-hop so much it constantly keeps me on my toes. There are a lot of subtle things that need to be done to make it sound good, and that is what I like so much about working with these guys. They go so many places soundwise during an evening that it keeps me very focused on the music.

Fact sheet

Products & services

Similar companies nearby