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AKG helps Kanye West cut the cord
KANYE WEST On-hand at all those shows was John Clark. Working as West’s monitor engineer, Clark provided special audio mixes to every performer onstage so that each could hear himself a bit louder than the rest of the band, which included backup singers, a DJ, a keyboardist, and a percussionist. Throughout the year, Clark found that AKG mics were just what the show needed to keep the audio crisp and clear. As might be expected, West, too, had a WMS4000 wireless mic system: “We tried it out - the artist liked it, management liked it, and I liked it, so we’ve been running with it ever since,” says Clark. However, the breadth of the AKG line was highlighted more by the daily use of 411 Acoustic Pickup “MicroMics” on the string section. The tour travelled with a few key players, but most of the string section was hired locally at each tour stop, which meant Clark had to capture the sound of different instruments every night. “We went from [a popular brand of] pickups on the strings to the C411 - and it was a night-and-day difference,” states Clark. “The clarity and quality was very nice, and we didn’t have that two-step process of wiring a pickup to a cable with a 1/4-inch plug that then went into direct box — it was one shot. Turn it on and go!” Meanwhile, the percussionist’s rig was covered with C391B cardioid capsule condenser mics and the background singers were captured with a variety of microphones over the course of the tour. Clark wanted to put the backing vocalists on AKG mics, so he initially switched out another brand’s model and gave the backers C5900M condenser mics - the same microphone capsule used on West’s wireless. Unfortunately, the vocalists didn’t sing as loud as expected...and their position onstage was right between the percussionist and a set of loudspeakers. Since the C5900M is designed to carefully capture every subtlety of the sounds around it, the microphone actually worked too well - it picked up the quiet vocalists, but it also heard the much louder percussionist and loudspeakers as well. As a result, if Clark tried to make the background vocals louder, he also got more percussion, so the vocals became “lost” in the mix. “We checked the mic, and it was working fine, so we realized we needed to get something a little less sensitive,” says Clark with a laugh. “We went to an AKG D880M, which is a dynamic microphone, and that seemed to do the trick.” From there on out, the tour’s vocals were trouble-free. (Courtesy of Clive Young of Harman International ) For more information please visit www.audioproducts.com.au or www.akg.com.
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Kanye West is an intellectual rapper who has graced the cover of Time Magazine and is currently working at the top of his game, all the while receiving critical acclaim for his music. He is renowned for being able to blow the doors off any arena in the world, and he does it while using AKG wireless microphones every time he steps on stage.
