Headliner Usher SD7 May 2015

Usher is one of the most
successful artists in the US
today, having sold a jawdropping 65 million records
worldwide. He first hit the
Billboard charts in the late ‘90s
with his second album, My Way,
which went six-time platinum,
but it was his 2004 release,
Confessions, that shot him to
super stardom status, shifting an
amazing 20 million copies all by
itself. Eight Grammys later, Usher
has just completed a European
tour. We caught up with his team
at the penultimate show at
Birmingham’s impressive
Barclaycard Arena.
ERIC WADE has been illuminating
Usher for fifteen years, in which time, his
show has evolved almost as much as the
artist. We sat down at front-of-house to
talk all things lighting.
I’ve been out on the road with bands since
I was seventeen-years-old, so it’s all I’ve
ever done. My role is to make sure that
everything is perfect, visually; and Usher
gets more involved as we go along. I’ll get
initial concepts, which he’ll sign off on, then
he lets us run with it for a bit. When we get
on the road, he starts feeling things, and he
starts saying, ‘oh, I could do something here’,
or ‘this could work here’. We only have two
shows left, and we were still writing new cues
yesterday with him! [laughs] We are running
everything on two Grand MA2s for lighting,
and two Grand MA lights for video. We use a
company out of Pennsylvania called Control
Freak Systems that basically interfaces
everything together (except the sound) so
we run all the cameras through them and the
lighting, and we then control everything from
front-of-house. We have a video director that
calls out all the program shots for IMAG, and
then we cut and go, and we manipulate that
however we like. It took three months to build
the show, Baz Halpin came in and did the
creative with Usher, and we moved forwards
from there. Mort Swinsky did most of the
initial programming, and built the looks, and
we have taken it from there. We did a whole
month of rehearsals as it’s a very cue heavy
show... We have close to seven thousand
events!
WALLS OF LIGHT
The big look of the show is the GLP X4S.
There are 216 of them on the back wall, and
I absolutely love them. They are the core
of everything, really, except for the pods
overhead. I have known [GLP President]
Mark Ravenhill a long time; he is a great guy,
and he always ends up sending me stuff. I
look at it as I trust his opinion, and what I
like about GLP is, they’re always interested
in finding out what we think, which is great
for the X4S, as we knew what we needed it to
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USHER
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RYAN CECIL
ERIC WADE
do. We were looking for a small light with
much more versatility - more an RGBW
than just RGB - and we definitely wanted
more speed, and control of the individual
pixels; and the GLP X4S was the answer;
it’s a perfect little light.
Tait Towers built our fantastic rolling
stage which only takes three hours to put
up. The GLPs are all on these ladders at the
back which Tait also built for us: there are
twelve ladders in total with eighteen lights
on each ladder, and those ladders move up,
down, left, and right, so when the video
wall splits, we can move all of them into
the middle, or vice versa. It means we can
keep the lights exposed by moving them
around, which is perfect. We have a lot of
motion and movement on this show, and
automation-wise, we have the ladders, the
pods, the video lifts that come out of the
deck, plus elevators, ribbon lifts, all kinds
of toys.
Everything we can hear, we pretty much
do lighting to it: every little accent, cut,
and bump. It’s pretty meticulous! And
Usher is a lovely guy. Very easy to work
with. His rig was quite a bit smaller in the
early days, but as he has grown, so has the
show. Every year we escalate it, because
he wants to do more, and he tries to give
the fans 150 percent every night. He wants
everything perfect the whole time, which
in turn makes for a great experience.
RYAN CECIL was initially brought
in to dep a few shows, and has now been
a permanent fixture at side stage for the
last four years. Since switching console,
everything’s also been that little bit rosier...
At the beginning, it was a smaller band,
and we didn’t have backing singers. We
were doing nothing but one-off shows,
but now everything is way bigger, so we
switched to DiGiCo. We have an SD5 at
front-of house [with Focusrite RedNet
preamps], and I run an SD7 with the
192kHz racks.
I run my console at 96kHz for two
reasons: increased clarity, and the lowest
possible latency. I did work with an SD10
for a while, but there is more stuff going on
now, so the SD7 is the better fit. Some of
these light-up ladders are actually triggered
off of audio from the console, so I send
eight mixes to the Control Freak guys out
back, which vary per song, and it’ll show
up on the bar graph meter on the actual
video wall. I never thought I would be
generating content from my SD7! [laughs]
We used to use a lot of outboard reverbs
from song to song. Usher’s studio engineer
would come out and say, ‘this is what we
used on this song’, and so on, and that’s
what we would go with, but when we
switched over to the DiGiCo console,
from almost the first show, he was like, ‘I
don’t need that reverb’. It went down at
least thirty percent straight away, and we’re
so comfortable now using all the inbuilt
effects in the SD7 that I don’t have to use
any other outboard processing.
KEEP IT SNAPPY
I use a snapshot per song, and if there’s
a change in a song for a band member, it
also gets snapshot, whereas if it’s for Usher,
I do it manually. I am hands-on mixing
his show the entire time. We have 56 aux
sends, most of which are in stereo, and on
the console, between inputs and outputs,
I think I only have eight spare, so there is a
lot going on.
I also use the DiGiGrid MGB for virtual
soundcheck, as it’s so compact - there are
112 channels of MADI in this unit, which
is pretty ridiculous! It sits at the back of my
desk, and an Ethernet cable plugs into my
laptop, then I record onto Reaper. I like it
so much, I actually bought two of them!
After a few shows, then a few more, you
eventually get to a point where you have
built a true relationship with the band;
and with this band, if they trust me, then
Usher can trust me - that’s the feeling I
got from the very beginning. He and I will
talk together about each show, and what
he needs, and I might say, ‘hey, tonight it’s
gonna be a very ‘live’ room so the audience
mics are gonna sound really boomy’, but
now, to be honest, it’s got to the point
where I don’t need to say anything,
because he really knows his stuff. He is a
great guy, and this really is a great show.
www.glp.de
www.digigrid.net
www.usherworld.com
www.digico.biz