All Access: LeAnn Rimes

Mix caught up with LeAnn Rimes on her visit to NorthernCalifornia’s Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, one of the firstshows using LBC’s new Meyer system, with 10 M2D Compact CurvilinearArrays, four 650-P subs, UPM-1P loudspeakers, and front- and sidefills.The tour started stateside in July and moves onto Australia, NewZealand and Hawaii before returning to the U.S. to work on her upcomingChristmas album.

“At FOH, I have a 68-inputMidas XL4 mixing console. I’m running about 38 outputs from my boardand I store snapshots for every song,” says house mixer SteveCochran. “I’m carrying my sweetest reverb choice — adual-engine TC M5000 for vocals and a few instruments — and Iwant to thank George Massenburg for the M5000’s GM Hall; it’s myfavorite reverb preset.” Other goodies in the house rack includea couple TC M2000s; an Eventide H4000; Yamaha D5000, SPX990 and SPX90;Anthony DeMaria stereo tube compressors on Rimes’ voice; as well as 10Aphex Expressors, BSS 901, Klark Teknik Helix and DN360 EQs and aMetric Halo SpectraFoo, a “great metering program,”according to Cochran.

According to monitor engineer Jon “JD” DuCrest, Rimes“owns everything we carry. The monitor console is a Ramsa SX1,with five stereo buses and 12 mono outs. On drums, we’re using SM91 onkick, SM57 on the snare top, Beta 57A on the bottom, KSM-137s on hi-hatand ride, SM98s on toms and the KSM-32s for overheads.” Themonitor rack includes a Tube-Tech CL1B inserted on Rimes’ vocal,Drawmer 201s, BSS 402s, Aphex Dominators, a couple Lexicon PCM80s and aSony R7 reverb. Rimes’ in-ear molds are Future Sonics; the band useShure E5s. DuCrest adds: “I use Shure’s UA888 networkinginterface to scan and keep track of the wireless guitars and the vocalmics. My latest new toy is a WinRadio [PC-based wideband receiver] thatI use to monitor the in-ear frequency scans.”

Rimes is using a prototype version of a Shure SM-86 wirelesscapsule. “The SM-86 capsule has sounded great onstage and atvarious television shows that we hit this summer. Shure mics are theone thing that LeAnn has used from the very beginning and we were oneof the first groups to get the PSM 600 systems.”