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Mixing The Iron Maiden ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ Tour, Part 1

After 140 shows in 33 countries for 3 million fans, metal giants Iron Maiden finally finished their latest tour—and are ready for the next one.

Iron Maiden's Legacy of the Beast tour ended more than four years, 140 shows and one worldwide pandemic after it started. Their next tour starts in May. Photo: John McMurtrie.
The Iron Maiden ‘Legacy of the Beast’ tour ended more than four years, 140 shows and one worldwide pandemic after it started. Their next tour starts in May. Photo: John McMurtrie.

Iron Maiden has never let obstacles get in its way, and the band’s epic Legacy of the Beast tour was a perfect example of that. The journey began with a concert in Tallinn, Estonia, way back in May 2018, and finally ended in Tampa, Florida, more than four years, 140 shows and one worldwide pandemic later, closing out even bigger than when it began.

Conceived as a three-year “greatest hits” touring cycle, the production was supposed to wrap up in 2020 with a four-month summer sprint through the stadiums of Europe, followed by the release of the band’s 17th album, Senjutsu. When COVID hit and put touring on hold, however, the group instead released the record, rescheduled for 2022, added a fall U.S. leg for good measure and, incredibly, took that sold-out European stadium run and sold it out even more.

FOH engineer Ken “Pooch” Van Druten is ready to rock behind his DiGiCoQuantum7 desk in Charlotte, North Carolina.
FOH engineer Ken “Pooch” Van Druten is ready to rock behind his DiGiCo Quantum7 desk in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“This phenomenon happened where they added tickets by moving to bigger venues,” says Ken “Pooch” Van Druten, the band’s FOH engineer. “Maybe 30-40,000 people already had tickets to a concert, but then most of the shows became 50,000 and a few were 80,000. We were doing at least two stadiums a week. Logistics were crazy—we were traveling with P.A., but there were at least three times where our rep at Clair Global, Andy Walker, had to provide a complete additional stadium system, prepped and ready to go, ahead of us.”

It made for crazy days, but Pooch has seen more than a few of those across a career that’s found him mixing everyone from Linkin Park to Justin Bieber. He came on board with the Iron Maiden team in late 2017 as the band switched to Clair Global for its audio requirements—a move that led to Pooch working with two systems engineers: Main SE Mike Hackman and Crew Chief/SE Tim Peeling.

“Mike is an Iron Maiden employee and was here for 10 years before I showed up,” says Pooch. “When I arrived in 2017, they were like, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s your system engineer’—which is very unusual, but I discovered that he is one of the best on the planet; I’m very, very lucky to have him. Meanwhile, Tim has been with Clair for years; when Iron Maiden switched to them, Clair wanted to send out a system guy that was familiar with the Cohesion P.A. system. After he got here, I was like, ‘We’re holding on to him, man; he’s great!’ Mike Hackman is the main design guy—he’ll look at the CAD drawings of venues and do the design—but Tim Peeling follows through with all the delay tower work. Those two are a godsend; it’s the only reason that we can do stadiums with such limited setup time.”

Scattered throughout the European run were several festival dates as well, which made achieving consistent sound all the more challenging. With the hopscotch nature of the tour, the production’s Clair Cohesion P.A. was used about 40 percent of the time. “It’s my favorite P.A., especially for this band,” says Pooch. “There’s something about the 12-inch speakers in that box that lend themselves to guitars.”

The rest of the European tour leg found the group using promoter-provided systems based around L-Acoustics K1s or d&b audiotechnik line arrays—fine systems, he adds, but the constant changes were sometimes distracting. Pooch explains, “I much prefer working on the same consistent speaker system so I can fine-tune my mix for that P.A. When you are on a different speaker system every day, it becomes a little bit more ‘combat audio.’ Luckily, I have an amazing team behind me, and those guys can take any system and tailor it to the way that I like it.”

The band’s longtime mascot, Eddie, is not miked. Photo: John McMurtrie
The band’s longtime mascot, Eddie, is not miked. Photo: John McMurtrie.

The Legacy of the Beast tour was a game-changer for the Iron Maiden camp, not merely due to the personnel or vendor changes, but also in how the FOH mix position was set up. Pooch opted to tackle the 56 inputs from the stage with a DiGiCo Quantum 7 console and a pair of Waves Extreme-C SoundGrid Servers—one for each engine in the desk.

With the vocal being among the most crucial parts of the mix, Pooch found himself leaning on two plug-ins in particular. The Waves Primary Source Expander was used on Bruce Dickinson’s voice to mitigate the tidal wave of stage bleed and stage noise getting into his Shure Beta 58, raising his gain before feedback without altering the tonality of his singing. Meanwhile, Waves’ F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ was also a go-to: “It’s a secret to my success in my opinion. The main vocal is sent to the key input of an F6 that is across the band bus. I’ve selected ‘mid side,’ which triggers a single filter that ducks about 6 dB of 1k just in the center; it doesn’t affect the outside of the mix. Instead, anytime there’s a vocal, it dips this 1k on the band bus and makes an amazing hole so the vocal pops.”

Adrian Smith (left) prefers to use in-ear monitors, while Steve Harris opts to use Turbosound TMS3 sidefills and custom wedges.
Adrian Smith (left) prefers to use in-ear monitors, while Steve Harris opts to use Turbosound TMS3 sidefills and custom wedges. Photo: John McMurtrie.

As might be expected, there were a few non-Waves plug-ins that Pooch put to use, such as Mixing Night Audio’s GreenHAAS, created by Grammy-nominated producer Ken Lewis, a friend going back to their Berklee College of Music days. “It’s a Haas Effect-type plug-in that I love on vocals, so I had to figure out how to host that outside of the Waves server,” says Pooch. The solution was to use another computer running Avid Pro Tools as an effects plug-in host. The computer was tied into the same SoundGrid network, and in a bid to avoid latency, it was used almost exclusively for effects, acting as a pre-delay of sorts.

That computer did have a second function, however, as it housed a half-dozen song intro .wav files. “One of the famous Iron Maiden songs, ‘The Number of the Beast,’ starts with ‘Woe to you, oh Earth and sea, for the Devil sends the beast with wrath!’” Pooch recites with verve. “That gets triggered at front of house, and previously, it was on an iPod and someone would push ‘play.’ When I showed up, I brought a Maschine MK2 controller; I can assign any of those intros to a single pad, and the computer has software that can control the .wav files.”

Not everything at FOH was in the digital realm, however. Analog outboard gear on-hand—and strapped across the mix buss—included a Sonic Farm Creamliner, a Rupert Neve Designs Master Buss Converter and also an RND Portico II Master Buss Processor. “I’m using that to spread out frequencies and push low frequencies forward—the width of the mix,” he explains. “Meanwhile, I’m using that Creamliner unit to make some warm harmonic distortion and then I’m converting it back to AES—back into my desk—with the Master Buss Converter. Those are magic boxes.”

 

CONTINUE ON TO THE CONCLUDING PART TWO.

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