Iconic dance trio Faithless has called time after 15 phenomenal years on the music scene, playing their final show at London’s O2 Academy Brixton at the beginning of April. Their Front of House engineer Mark Kennedy had worked with the band since 1996 and throughout his tenure has relied on the quality and reliability of products and superior support that Sennheiser has provided him with.
“It’s been wonderful to work with Faithless,” declares Kennedy. “The back up 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 customized 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.”
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 says. “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.”
Kennedy also utilised e 914 condenser microphones, positioned overhead, which are ideal for very demanding situations. “They sound so good,” he continues. “So much so that we started off with one, but the percussion player, who uses loads of wind chimes, etc 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 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 smiles. “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.”
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