MyMama Tour 2021; conquered by the reliability and consistency of SLX-D ©Diletta Radaelli

La Rappresentante di Lista is a volcanic and eclectic band, which contains in its microcosm, an infinite series of talents and facets. Their shows are therefore always characterized by a strong need for continuous upheavals in the arrangement of the musicians on stage, for the passage of instruments between the latter, of movements, choreographies or real performative acts, almost transforming their concert into a theatrical show with characters who live and develop together with their audience.

Customer Profile

Arturo Magnanensi, Audio Engineer at the the MyMama tour: "The tour was characterized by the strong need of the band to finally be able to express the great energy and creativity stored during the period of the lock-down; combining it and putting it, however, at the service of a necessary flexibility and adaptability to the many different types of concerts that the tour schedule envisaged. Also due to the restrictive regulations related to the pandemic, the show had to be able to be done at different times, in different lighting conditions, in relatively small or even very large stages, without ever affecting its nature or its technical and artistic performance for the public. So I would say that the technical flexibility was fundamental in order to guarantee a coherence of the show in all the various venues in which we found ourselves having to create the show."

These needs, as you can imagine, have greatly influenced the choice of audio technology: our team needed to be able to guarantee the artists all the mobility and reliability necessary to perform the show almost "forgetting" to have any equipment on or in hand. Specifically, Dario (vocals, guitar, bass, piano and sax) and Veronica (vocals), front man and frontwoman of the band, needed to be able to move freely on the whole stage and throughout the "walkable" area of the stalls; hence the choice of opting for both exclusively on wireless instrumentation of maximum reliability, which would guarantee stability even over considerable distances and in RF environments, that are not always easy to manage

Challenge

As mentioned before, the tour visited extremely different venues in all respects - this meant that, if in some venues the RF environment was extremely workable and easy to manage, in others, also due to the specific position of the venue, the RF environments were extremely crowded - a challenge that was essential to foresee in the pre-production phase, given that the wireless systems on the stage were active at the same time. Some of the venues had extremely complex RF challenges - very crowded and with small bands that were really "workable". The SLX-D systems allowed us to make the most of those few RF resources that these venues made available to us, and with very little forethought they allowed us to nullify every RF challenge that we found ourselves facing.

Solution

After some team evaluations, we agreed that Shure wireless systems were the ones that best suited the technical and artistic needs of the show, and that guaranteed us greater reliability from many points of view. The two SLXD24E systems were used for the band's lead vocal, Veronica, and its spare microphone; the two SLXD14DE systems were used for the band's string instruments - electric guitars and electric bass, mostly played by Dario.

The artists were conquered by the reliability and consistency of the systems, which was evident to them already after a few dates, when despite having been used in the most disparate venues, they never altered their functionality and quality in the slightest.

One of the band members said that for the first time on this tour, he completely forgot that he was using a wireless system. He thinks it's the best compliment that can be paid to the SLX-D system: it allowed artists to focus only on their performance, removing any thought about the audio technique behind it.

Advantages

The KSM9 capsule has made it possible to maximize the vocality and dynamism of the singer, who during the course of the concert exploits a very wide range, both at a dynamic level and at a purely vocal level. This great variability, and the large number of movements that Veronica makes during the show is not always "supported" by the microphones, and this means that some vocal and emotional nuances of the performance are lost. This is not the case with the KSM9 capsule, which instead has allowed the singer to have a clearly hear her voice, guaranteeing greater control and greater freedom of interpretation.

Technically speaking, the KSM9 capsule allowed a constant receptivity during movements, choreographies, moments of extreme dynamics and moments of very low vocal emission; to a greater extent than other capsules previously tried on Veronica's voice. Furthermore, in the most "intimate" or more dynamic moments of the concert, it made it possible to almost eliminate the proximity effect completely, which had always been a significant problem for her vocality. 

At the end of the tour the judgment is decidedly positive; "I was particularly struck by the RF stability and the immediacy of the system; the use is very easy, and I don't think it ever happened to me not to know where to look for a function or a parameter during the whole tour. Wireless Workbench was a fundamental "tour companion", which allowed me to greatly speed up the work of setting up wireless systems by virtue of the specific RF environment of each date".

Images: ©Diletta Radaelli