FOH online.com NEWSROOM

04/21/04 10:31am pst
Ziggy Marley Tours With Rat Sound and InnovaSON

Ziggy Marley and Spearhead have just completed a co-headlining US tour. Rat Sound supplied the concert sound system, which included a pair of InnovaSON digital consoles, enabling the California-based live sound production company to meet the weight restrictions of the truck and the space limitations at some of the smaller venues.

Crew chief and monitor technician Chris "Grandpa" Rymarz is something of an InnovaSON veteran, having recently completed a year-long world tour with Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals and a pair of InnovaSON Grand Live digital live sound consoles. For the Ziggy Marley/Spearhead tour, Rymarz brought along a Grand Live at Front of House and a Compact Sy40 for monitors.

Ziggy Marley, son of the legendary reggae star Bob Marley, was promoting his first solo album, Dragonfly. This recording was made with a seven-piece backing band instead of the Melody Makers, the band that features several of his siblings. The InnovaSON consoles ensured rapid changeovers between Marley and the other bands on the tour, which also included Michael Franti and Spearhead.

"I've used the InnovaSON before and I can't say enough about the automation and how I have the ability to be able to use this console on multiple 40-plus input bands," enthuses Rymarz. "The changeover is just so simple and painless and has now been made instantaneous!" Rymarz also handled monitors for Spearhead.

The on-board processing available as standard on the entire range of InnovaSON consoles translates into a major saving in tour production equipment and requires less real estate at the venue. "All we bring now, in addition to the consoles, are a few effects units and a CD player," Rymarz confirms. "We were in small venues and had a small space to work with sometimes, so the InnovaSONs were definitely an advantage in that respect. Both FOH and monitor positions are much smaller. They saved space in the venue."

According to Rymarz, on the Ben Harper world tour, the lightweight and compact nature of the InnovaSON consoles meant that they could be easily and inexpensively air freighted between shows where necessary. Although airfreight wasn't an issue on the Marley tour, Rat Sound still had a budget to meet, and using the compact InnovaSON consoles once again provided considerable cost savings.

"With a tour like this, we were very limited by the amount of weight the small 24-foot truck we were using could safely hold," he explains. "Having lighter consoles that required very little additional processing helped us fit the entire monitor system, Front of House control, and backline in one 24-foot truck and remain underweight."

Using InnovaSON digital consoles offered an additional weight savings through the ability to position the input Stage Box on stage and transmit the signals to the console via a pair of coaxial cables. The coax pair additionally facilitates remote control of the preamplifiers, phantom power, and converters from the console.

"The snake is also much lighter now," observes Rymarz. "These trucks have very limited weight, and the coax snakes have saved us several hundred pounds compared to a conventional 52-channel multi-pair."

Ziggy Marley next hits the road as part of The Marley Family Presents: Roots, Rock, Reggae Festival. The tour will run from late July and through early September throughout North America with rotating supporting acts and is scheduled to also include Ziggy's brothers, Stephen, Julian and Damian.

InnovaSON is a Digigram company and is based at Plougoumelen in Brittany, France. In the United States and Latin America, Sennheiser Electronic Corporation is the exclusive distributor of InnovaSON. For more information, visit www.innovason.com and www.sennheiserusa.com.

Photo, L-R: Michael Versteegt (FOH Spearhead), Errol Brown (FOH Ziggy), Chris "Grandpa" Rymarz (System Tech and Monitors Spearhead), Keith Grant (Monitors Ziggy)

Photo courtesy of Kevin Westenberg.