This autumn saw the ‘First Lady of British Musical Theatre’ Elaine Paige take a break from her regular BBC Radio 2 show to make a welcome return to the stage, touring “Elaine Paige In Concert” throughout the UK, Scandinavia, China, Hong Kong and the USA.

Sound By Design’s services were secured to provide both engineering support and sound reinforcement equipment for some forty plus rehearsal and show dates with the west-end singer, who was accompanied by a thirteen-piece orchestra in a show of musical theatre and show-tune classics.

With a combined input list of 48 channels, full-time Senior Engineer Griff Hewis took on the front-of-house engineering duties on the UK and Scandinavian tour legs, choosing a Midas Heritage 2000 with outboard effects from Yamaha, TC Electronic and Lexicon for mixing duties. Outboard processing was provided from BSS, Drawmer and XTA.

Griff chose to tour a twenty-box system of Meyer Sound M1D curvilinear array as the main flown arrays, with additional ground stacks and fill of Meyer Sound UPA-1P and UPM-1P self powered speakers. Meyer Sound 650-P sub bass cabinets were utilised to give the system the necessary low-end punch.

For monitors, Senior Engineer John Gale had the task of providing twelve hard-wired IEM mixes and ten on-stage wedges for the band, choosing Sound By Design's EM Acoustics M-12S wedges as the stage monitor of choice. In addition to the hard-wired IEM, four Shure PSM700 wireless IEM provided monitoring for Ms. Paige and the musical director.

For mixing duties John chose the versatility of the DiGiCo D1, his preferred desk for touring shows due to its compact size and high auxiliary output count. This allowed over twenty mixes to be recalled and tweaked in an instant each day with multiple onboard processing, reverbs and EQ all in place, negating the need for racks of outboard processing. A Midas XL42 channel strip was used as a front end pre-amp for the main vocal and an external Yamaha SPX990 reverb was chosen as the preferred unit for Elaine Paige’s in-ear mixes.

The UK leg of the tour saw an extensive itinerary across many varied venues, regularly selling out in major cities. The Scandinavian leg of the tour also saw numerous sell-out venues including a Velodrome arena, always an interesting place to put on a concert!

The Christmas period of December through to January saw John very busy, with shows in China, Hong Kong and the USA. Probably the highlight was a double sell-out show in the Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre where Elaine performed to over 5000 people in two days. For these shows systems were sourced from local suppliers, with the main differences being JBL Vertec as the FOH system and Clair Brothers 12 AM wedges for monitors. In China and the USA John mixed monitors on locally sourced DiGiCo D5s and in the Hong Kong Convention Centre he mixed on a Yamaha PM5D.

Such was the success of Sound By Design’s role they were also asked to provide engineering and monitoring equipment for Elaine’s recent appearance on BBC Radio 2’s “Friday Night Is Music Night”, with a number of other corporate shows and appearances booked for the near future.