Small but Powerful - RIVAGE PM3 Tours with Paloma Faith

Singer/songwriter Paloma Faith’s UK and European tour to promote her latest album The Glorification of Sadness featured a Yamaha RIVAGE PM3 digital mixing system at front of house. It gave engineer Gabriele ‘Gabe’ Nicotra the best of both worlds on a tour where maximum flexibility and audio quality had to be fitted into difficult touring logistics.

The tour started in early April, headlining UK and European theatres, before festival dates took it through until late August. Spoken word monologues were an important part of the production and tended to vary in set position and length each night, while audiences were very keen to sing along featured at all shows and, at the headline shows, Faith played two sets.

With a line-up comprising drums, bass, keyboards, guitar/second keyboards and two backing vocalists alongside Faith, the artist wanted to be as creative as possible on stage. But limited transport space and a small crew meant the Front of House mixing console needed to be as compact as possible.

Audio production company Solotech was originally planning to supply a Yamaha RIVAGE PM7 system for the FoH mix. But by using a Yamaha RIVAGE PM3, Gabe could give Faith the same creative options, but in a smaller package that fitted the logistics of the tour.

“I was running exactly the same show. For me there was no difference at all, apart from some of the physical controls and I used an iPad for screen recalls, instead of the PM7’s second screen,” he says.

For the monologues, Gabe used Yamaha’s Genius.Lab software to write a macro for the RIVAGE PM3’s user defined buttons. This allowed him to instantly switch between a fully-processed, rich sound for the sung vocals and a more stripped-back sound for the spoken word parts.

The DaNSe noise suppression and Interphase time/phase alignment plug-ins were also a vital part of his tour setup.

“The difference between DaNSe and a traditional noise gate is fantastic,” he says. “I was using it on a synth with a particularly noisy output. I hit the learn button while the synth wasn't playing, so it knew the unwanted noise and it then automatically filtered it out. It was a really quick, tight way of getting rid of it.”

Meanwhile, Interphase allowed Gabe to quickly line up things which changed on a daily basis.

“As much as we marked positions of, for example, kick in and kick out or snare top and snare bottom microphones, it can never be exactly the same at each show,” he says. “Using Interphase, you can see how the two waveforms line up with each other, hit the align button and it pretty much takes care of it.”

Gabe also used Interphase creatively on the entire drum kit, routing the kit through a clean buss and a second buss, through external parallel compression.

“Because of the slight delay going in, out and back into the desk, I used Interphase to delay the clean buss back to the processed one. It’s a problem solver in that regard as well,” he says. “And it’s really quick - I could set it up during line check, then all it took was a couple of hits to line it up and make sure it was all in phase.

“There are external plugins which you can use to do a similar job, but they are not quite the same. Anyone I have shows it to goes ‘That's fantastic, finally someone's implemented it within a console!’

“RIVAGE PM really is a big step up from the competition and the size of the RIVAGE PM3 makes it perfect for a tour where you need all the facilities in a small package.”