Faithless bow out full of praise for Sennheiser
Published: MEA
UAE: Dance group Faithless chose Nasimi Beach at Dubai’s Atlantis Hotel as the location for their final Middle East performance. Their front of house engineer Mark Kennedy had worked with the band since 1996 and throughout his tenure has relied on products and support from Sennheiser.
‘It’s been wonderful to work with Faithless,’ declared Mr Kennedy. ‘The backup I received from Mark Saunders at Sennheiser UK has been amazing and the mics have been fabulous – in all the years I’ve been using them, I’ve always set up the spare radio mic, but I’ve never had to use it. The original SKM 3072 we used were customised somewhat because Faithless stage shows are very loud. More recently, we moved to SKM 500-945, which have been wonderful and are a vast improvement.’
Mr Kennedy employed a combination of the aforementioned SKM 500-945 G3 hand helds for lead and backing vocals, ew 300 IEMs for monitoring and ew 372 radio guitar systems.
‘The mids and highs are super clear and the e 945 cardioid capsule has a very tight pattern,’ he said. ‘Faithless is savagely loud on stage and at one point we were using eight L-Acoustic Kudo and four SB28s per side as sidefills, which is an enormous rig and the e 945s are wonderful for the off axis rejection. In fact, I wouldn’t have been able to do the show without them.’
Mr Kennedy also used e 914 condenser microphones, positioned overhead. ‘They sound so good,’ continued the FOH engineer. ‘So much so that we started off with one, but the percussion player, who uses loads of wind chimes, on her rig, loved them so much that we ended up with five of them in total, adding one on cymbals, one on wind chimes and a stereo pair on shakers, so she can go from left to right across the stereo image.’
As far as Mr Kennedy is concerned, no other company comes close to the levels of service Sennheiser provides. ‘Having Mark on site with kit at festivals is a wonderful facility to have, even though we haven’t had to use it,’ he smiled. ‘Sennheiser as a company is very pro active in its attempts to find solutions to problems I’ve had with the band. If I ask Mark a question, he’ll go away and come up with an engineering solution to a perceived problem that works.’