Midas flies high with Noel Gallagher

26 October 2012

World - FOH and Monitors engineers, Antony King and Nahuel Gutierrez, have used Midas consoles of varying shapes and sizes during the year-long world tour with Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds. The pair kicked off the tour with a PRO6 then picked up an XL8 for the arena leg and followed up by using a PRO2C for festivals.

For the past 12 months Gallagher and his band have performed to audiences at a plethora of venue types and sizes, from huge outdoor festivals and arenas to small theatres and events - at home and abroad.

King and Gutierrez's mission - to ensure the quality of Noel's distinctive sound remains the same for every gig. Gutierrez explains, "The High Flying Birds tour has demanded several different engineering approaches to make it work. We had PRO6s in every territory for the first three months of the tour. Then we came back to the UK and into the arenas and we changed over to the XL8, primarily because we needed a lot more channels. In America we chose to use a PRO2. That was principally so we could sync everything for the upcoming South American leg - we needed the smaller surface so it could be shipped out without too much cost. We then returned to the UK for the festival season. Because we had a really good time on the PRO2s we elected to use them all summer. Now we're back to the XL8 for the final arena run with the choir."

And, if you followed all that, Noel, High Flying Birds, King and Gutierrez have recently completed a short run in Asia, where they returned to using the lightweight PRO2s.

For respected FOH engineer King, a Midas user since 2008, it has been a clear-cut decision deciding which brand to pin his reputation on: "For me MIDAS consoles just sound better. There's no way around it, whatever you do it sounds bigger - fatter. From the moment you turn the console on it's a cleaner signal."

Meanwhile, on monitors, Gutierrez has a similar view: "I love the warmth of the Midas sound, it's distinctive."

(Jim Evans)