London, UK (March 16, 2017)—For this year’s Brit Awards, held at London’s O2 in late February, sound provider Britannia Row provided audio for the event, which is akin to the Grammys in the U.S. The centerpiece of the evening was a tribute to the late pop singer/songwriter, George Michael, featuring Chris Martin of Coldplay.
Colin Pink was Brit Row’s team leader for the event and found other artists mix engineers were equally at home with the console set-up. “We used the latest DiGiCo SD12 for the presenter boards this year,” he said. “DiGiCo lent them to us and they were great. Both front of house and monitors used SD7, two in each position although Coldplay did bring in their own monitor console. And Sennheiser supported us once more. Everyone used the Sennheiser 2000 series IEMs, except the 1975, who brought in their own Shure system. The PA was a distributed design based on L-Acoustic K1, with other elements from their range used for fills.”
“The system sounded great,” said Bradshaw. “When it’s rigged so high up – as it so often is for these television spectaculars – then coverage of the floor area is a concern. But we had lots of time to walk around and check. We were there two days, one for the George Michael performance and one for Little Mix which I also looked after, and it sounded really good everywhere.”
The George Michael performance in question was a tribute duet by Chris Martin of Coldplay with a recording of Michael singing “A Different Corner.” Garry Bradshaw explained, “This was a live take from one of [Michael’s] concerts on the Symphonica tour. For me, hearing his voice again like that really raised the hairs on the back of my neck.”
Not surprisingly a lot of attention went into this performance, “We rehearsed on site the previous day,” said Bradshaw. “Myself and Dan Green for Chris Martin had half the desk each, I had the left side, three faders—one of the music, which was recorded specially for this performance; one of George, from the tour; and a fader for those little bits of dialogue that were cut into the tribute.”
Britannia Row Productions Ltd
www.britanniarow.com
