Award-winning film composer Hans Zimmer brought his smash-hit tour, Hans Zimmer Live, to North America this fall with 20 arena dates across the United States and Canada, including a birthday show at the iconic Madison Square Garden and an exclusive L-ISA immersive experience at Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas.
Bringing Cinematic Scores to Life
Following a sold-out European run, the tour marked the North American return of the “Hollywood Rebel,” as he was dubbed by the BBC, who memorably rocked Coachella in 2017 with his outstanding live band and orchestra. Audiences were enthralled from the sound of the first note as they joined Zimmer on a journey through an array of well-loved scores from the multiple Academy Award- and Grammy-winner’s career, including Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Interstellar, The Lion King, The Last Samurai, and Dune.
“I’m thrilled to return to perform in North America with my wonderful band and excited to share this phenomenal show,” Zimmer said on his tour’s website. “Ultimately, the music connects us all, and I promise you this: we will always play our best, straight from the heart.”
L-Acoustics K1: Power Meets Precision
That level of performance required a sound system just as powerful, delivered in the robust form of an L-Acoustics K1 concert sound system carried by Orlando-based LMG Touring. “Hans’ music demands exceptional dynamic range. It requires a sound system that performs exceptionally well during both quiet and loud moments, while delivering a uniform response across all volume levels,” says Colin Pink, the front-of-house engineer and system designer for Hans Zimmer Live. “K1 always delivers both pin-drop clarity for Hans’ delicate passages and the effortless headroom needed for his much more earth-shaking moments.”
Most of the performances on the North American trek featured a system deployment of 16 K1 over four K2 per side, each paired with a hang of 12 KS28 subs, all of which were powered by LA12X amplified controllers. Out-fills comprised 23 Kara II per side, while two L2 per side hung above the FOH mix position supplied delay. These were driven by LA7.16 amplified controllers, which were also used to power seven A10 Focus plus two A10 Wide for front-fill, all discretely signaled. Three P1 Milan-AVB processors plus one LC16D rounded out the L-Acoustics complement. An L-ISA Processor II was additionally used for testing and programming at the tour’s exclusive immersive show at Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas on September 29.
Custom Configurations for Complex Productions
The tour’s system had a number of highly customized configurations, designed to accommodate the production’s huge stage and numerous musicians. “Probably the most unique one was the addition of delay cabinets for an arena rock show,” explains Robby Schlegel, LMG Systems’ Manager for Audio. “Hans’ desire to have enhanced clarity and definition to every seat in the audience was communicated to us, so we worked with the system engineers to deploy L2 systems for the delays, and they just blew anything else that we’d ever used out of the water. They were fantastic! In fact, I would say that the seating areas covered by L2 were the best-sounding seats in the house, even though they were farther back in the arena.”
The Hans Zimmer team stressed the importance of clarity and acoustic excellence everywhere in the arenas, Schlegel point outs. To accomplish this, the entire system was designed to be modular, to accommodate a range of venue sizes and geometries. “We had a total of 23 Kara II per side, all driven by LA7.16, and we included enough rigging and cabling to be able to split the hang—we would sometimes do a high-fill array in addition to a low-fill array. Splitting the array allowed more options for tuning and for overall coverage. By splitting it into a higher and a lower, we could point the boxes where needed without sacrificing coverage to the upper or lower sides, or having to choose which one we wanted to prioritize.”
Massive Musical Ensemble Demands Premium Processing
Pink points out that the instrumentation on stage was diverse, including two drummers; two percussionists who play a selection of acoustic and electronic percussion; two guitarists; two bass players; three violinists, one of which also plays viola; as well as two electric cellists. “Hans himself is playing keyboards, guitar, bass, and banjo,” he says. “There’s also another keyboard player, and an orchestra of 20, and a 12-piece choir. It’s huge.”
Pink mixed the show from a theatre-software-equipped DiGiCo Quantum7T, which he says was a necessary complement for the L-Acoustics sound system for this unique outing. “It’s my go-to desk because it’s big enough to handle a show like this,” he says. “Because we have such loud instruments, percussionists downstage left and downstage right, as well as two drummers upstage center, it’s very hard to time-align the front-fills to the acoustic source of the sound. I use the theatre software because it gives me a cross-point delay matrix, which means I can delay separate areas on the stage to each front-fill individually so that a snare drum downstage left is time-aligned to anyone listening to any of the front-fills. It’s a complex system for a very complex show, but K1 is the only system that I could imagine being able to do this all so well in a normal stereo layout, night after night.”
“Our Resorts World Theatre performance gave us the opportunity to use their in-house K2-based L-ISA system, which was a great chance to compare it with our touring system,” Pink notes. “As I have already made 15 stage areas for my front-fill timing, it was easy to use these groups to zone instruments into the L-ISA soundscape. The clarity and separation you get is instantly very obvious and I found that I didn’t need half of the tricks I normally use to get clarity out of a mix. Instruments had their own space and placement, and it was very easy to keep the separation and create a cohesive whole using the Room Engine to blend things together. It was great experience for both me mixing and the audience as a whole!”
For more details on Hans Zimmer Live, visit www.hanszimmerlive.com. LMG Touring can be found online at www.lmgtouring.net.
