Martin Audio stands up to challenges of Eddie Izzard tour

Take one artiste, one hyper-cardioid wireless mic and 35 years of comedy history and you have Eddie Izzard’s Remix Tour Live. Then add a disparate collection of venues – ranging in capacity from 2,200 to 840, some with tiered balconies and some with no flying facilities – and sound effects ranging from dinosaurs to Darth Vader, and you potentially have a mighty headache for the production team.

As Izzard has previously toured with Martin Audio’s scalable and versatile WPS line array, the comedian’s production crew is well aware of the system’s adaptability.

Solotech senior account manager Robin Conway says: “The last Eddie Izzard tour [Wunderbar, in 2019] was part of the reason I bought the WPS in the first place. This time around, production and I wanted to provide the same level of consistency, while retaining a single truck.”

Bare minimum
As a result, the inventory was stripped back to a bare minimum. The sound design was reworked from venue to venue by sound engineer, Scott (Scoobie) Scherban, and system tech Rayne Ramsden, who worked alongside production manager, Stephen Reeve.

Production carried 24 WPSs to enable 12-a-side elements to be flown at the largest venue, Birmingham Symphony Hall, as well as four SX218s, six DD6s (generally as lipfills) and a pair of XD12 for various balcony delays or sidefills. This scaled down to just a pair of WPSs stacked on a single SX218 at bijou venues  such as Brighton Theatre Royal and Richmond Theatre.

The rig was driven by Martin Audio’s one-box iKON multi-channel amplifiers. In Glasgow, a stacked six-a-side WPS was deployed on a single SX218, while in Cardiff, the team reverted to a vertical SX218 with four WPSs stacked on top.

Scherban citing one venue that permitted only a single sub with four WPSs stacked on top. “It did an incredible job,” he says. “To be able to ground stack like that, and manage to cover three balconies up, is pure genius.”

Getting a single mic to travel with power and clarity into the deepest recesses of small venues was one of Ramsden’s prime concerns. “Having the one-box resolution was useful in being able to move the audio within the space,” he says.

Ramsden used Martin Audio’s DISPLAY 2 software to optimise the sound. “It’s much quicker to get a 2D CAD slice out than to draw the whole venue, particularly when you don’t have pre-given calculations,” he says.

“The great thing about WPS is that it’s a big-sounding box in a small format, which helped keep the sightlines as clear as possible. You can use it anywhere – as a complement to WPL, as delays or side hangs.” Or as a standalone workhorse PA in its own right.