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Live Sound

Miking Kendrick Lamar at Coachella

With 125,000 in attendance at this year’s Coachella Festival, ensuring that every syllable recited by headliner Kendrick Lamar could be heard loud and clear was crucial. The task fell to the artist’s audio team, which employed Sennheiser’s Digital 9000 and new Digital 6000 wireless systems.

Indio, CA (May 31, 2017)–With 125,000 in attendance at this year’s Coachella Festival, ensuring that every syllable recited by headliner Kendrick Lamar could be heard loud and clear was crucial. The task fell to the artist’s audio team, which employed Sennheiser’s Digital 9000 and new Digital 6000 wireless systems.

Monitor engineer Chris Lee says that Lamar first became interested in switching to Sennheiser digital wireless after performing with Beyoncé on her Digital 9000 system. “He was really impressed with how that system performed on the shows they did together, so we reached out to Sennheiser and discovered that the new 6000 series receiver would work with the SKM 9000 series sticks that he had requested and perfectly fit our needs,” Lee said.

The Coachella performance marked the debut of their new wireless system, which includes two EM 6000 receivers for four channels of audio transmission. The four microphones used for the setup, which cover lead vocals, a lead vocal backup mic and two guest mics, are each SKM 9000 transmitters paired with MD 9235 capsules.

“We were very happy with our 5000 series wireless system, but now that we’ve heard the Digital 6000 in action, it’s like night and day,” said Lee. Front-of-house engineer Kyle T. Hamilton concurred, noting, “The rejection on the MD 9235 is stunning. With a show like this there are pre-programmed backing vocals and samples from the studio recordings, so you really want to try to match that studio vocals as much as possible.” The EM 6000 also lets the pair utilize a nearly all-digital signal path throughout—dipping into analog only for a high-end tube compressor—to ensure maximum signal integrity all the way from the capsule to the PA system and monitors. “The sound coming through digital is crystal-clear, and then I can add a little color with the tube compressor for that extra magic,” Hamilton said.

Sennheiser
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