When Mix first spoke with Tom Fletcher, front-of-houseengineer for young pop sensation Hilary Duff, he was just out with herfor warmup dates. Now out in full swing with full production, we spokeagain and he gave us the lowdown on her road gear.
“Of course, the Midas XL4 console has to be my favorite pieceof gear; we use it at both FOH and monitors. The entire Clair Bros.P.A. system is an amazing piece. Our system consists of 16 Clair I4s,which is a curvilinear array as opposed to a line array. We also haveeight T2 double-18 subs. These were originally designed by MD Systems,and in the past year have been modified and are now running off theClair iO system.
“All mics are Audio-Technica. Hilary’s is a wireless versionof the [Artist Elite] AE6100: the ATW-T341 from the 3000 Series. I’mfortunate to be part of a strong team. James [Pugsley] McDurmet is anextremely talented stage and in-ear mixer — one of the best inthe industry. The other audio crewmembers that make this all a successare system engineer Arepad Sayko, stage tech Dwayn Diaz, and newestmember, Bob Reinkin.
“This could be a whole other article in itself, but for themost part, I’m a big fan of TC Electronic for reverbs, delays,chorusing and many other things. I also use dbx compressors and Drawmergates. I keep it pretty simple as with most anything to do with audio,but the key to good sound is the source. And we have an excellentsource: The band and Hilary are kickin.’”