When accomplished music producers who are also artists take to the live stage, sound quality is always going to be top of the agenda. With this in mind, London-based sound engineer Mark Portlock had no hesitation in recommending an award-winning DPA d:facto™ Vocal Microphone when he was asked to handle Front of House duties for US pop duo Timeflies who recently undertook their first headline European tour.
Consisting of Rob Resnick and Cal Shapiro, Timeflies were formed in 2010, and are best known for YouTube covers and original music, combining elements of hip-hop, pop, electro, R&B, and rap.
Microphone choice was very important to the success of Timeflies tour. There were 16 venues on the agenda ranging from 200 to 1200 capacity. In some of the smaller venues the PA was often flown close to the stage, which added to the challenge of delivering consistent ‘produced pop’ with ‘sugar sweet’ compressed vocals and clean intelligible rap.
“The microphone choice was crucial as the band was exclusively on IEMs,” Portlock explains. “The first challenge was to achieve a constant and stable level from the vocal, which is not as easy as it sounds when the artist (Cal Shapiro) is moving around directly beneath small PA systems, in the crowd and occasionally jumping from the DJ table! Cal also loves to cup the mic when he raps and he frequently sings off axis and points the mic out over the crowd. The d:facto™ Vocal Microphone was the ideal choice for him because it gave me great pattern control, while the colouration on the mic from ambient noise was much sweeter sounding and natural than other high end vocal mics around.
As Timeflies is effectively a pop act, Portlock treated the microphone differently to a normal rock vocal.
“Firstly, there was plenty of EQ to stabilise the sound between Cal’s rapping and singing,” he says. “Then there was a lot (and I mean a lot) of compression and make up; sometimes up to 20:1 with 12db with the vocal slamming hard into the compressor throughout much of the show. Two reverbs, pitch change and delay were also added and heavily equalised, then applied in layers to achieve the dynamic and right up front ‘poppy’ vocals required, while the harder edged rap vocal sat further back in the mix allowing the live tracks to provide the dynamic range in the show. It was a little backwards, I know, but the band and management loved the results. Everywhere we went the in-house audio guys commented on the quality of the sound and many were surprised at the overall volume and density we achieved from small PA systems and often under the oppressive thumb of many EU noise limits, some as low as 91dba peak!”
