In the space of little more than a year, Tinie Tempah has gone from relative unknown to double BRIT Award winner. His rise has been meteoric by any standards and his reliance on Sennheiser microphones and in ear monitors is born from a desire to make sure that his sound is as great as his reputation is becoming.
Tinie has just finished a tour of some of the UK’s best known arenas and he, his band have and his audio crew have appreciated both the quality of Sennheiser’s product and the back up that they receive from the company and in particular special projects manager, Phil Cummings.
Tinie’s microphone of choice is a ‘blinged’ SKM 2000 handheld and his in ear monitoring system is a combination of SR2000 and EK2000 (also blinged) which, says monitor engineer Raphael Williams, have proved to be particularly effective, especially in festival situations.
“We use the in ears for clarity and noise reduction,” he explains. “They give definition, clarity and directness – and reduce injury for others. If you want to deafen yourself, that’s up to you, but you don’t damage anyone else’s hearing. We also utilise ambient mics, so that Tinie can feel like he’s in the room.
“The ears cable acts like an antenna, so you have that extra strength of signal which keeps the connection much stronger and is a real improvement, especially at festivals because there’s no drop out on stage.“
Williams has moved from G3 to 2000 Series microphones in large part because they provide a wider frequency range for US tours. But there are additional benefits: “We’ve found the durability to be really good,” he says. “And the new design means you can change the heads, which makes it much easier to change between different ones. We don’t do that very much at the moment, but we plan to go from the 935 to the 945 in the future.
“Tinie has always been with Sennheiser, so he’s always had that quality. He really likes the tone, which has a lot of warmth to it, and the headroom as well. There’s a lot of rejection before feedback and Tinie cups the mic, that doesn’t help anyone, but the Sennheiser’s always work.”
Front of House engineer Nikoma Bell concurs, “The Sennheiser mic is great. With other mics, when he cups it you can hear a massive difference, but with the Sennheiser sometimes it’s difficult to know when he is and when he isn’t. Also, other diaphragms don’t move as well. We can push the Sennheiser’s really hard and a lot of people are really surprised at the level I get out of his vocal.”
For the band, there is a combination of G2 in ears with an AC3000 active antenna combiner, A5000-CP circular polarised antenna and two A2003 passive antennas. Microphones are SKM 2000s with MMD 935, e906 guitar microphone for cabs, e904 and e905 for toms/snare, plus Neumann KM184s for the aforementioned overheads..
“We have a couple of Neumanns KM184s on the hi hats and 904s on the snares, which are great. Because the drum kit is so big – five toms, three snares and a kick and loads of cymbols – that we can’t really have stands, especially for the second snare, which is quite a deep sound and the 904s are great. Our guitarist has two cabinets and we use the 906 on the main one, but the lead sound has a condenser.”
DJ Charlsey has been supporting Tinie throughout the tour and has discovered the multitude of advantages that working with the Rane Sixty-Eight DJ mixer brings. “It’s made my life so simple,” he says. I does absolutely everything I need and enables me to control all the visuals during Tinie’s shows.
“It saves us a lot of time and money as well because now, instead of having to have an extra person controlling the visuals, which adds another wage to the budget, I can do all that myself.”
“With two Brits to his name, Tinie’s done really well and it’s happened really quickly, in fact, we’ve only been together as a team for a year,” adds tour/production manager Tobi Oyerinde. “We deal with the music, putting that together, as well as Tinie’s creative ideas and trying to make those reality, which sometimes isn’t easy and would be impossible without the support of Phil.
“He sometimes gets his friends to come along and join in. For him, it’s just his mates coming along, for us it’s channels to find, equipment to find [guest handhelds here are two SKM 935 G3s]. Whenever we have requests, however crazy they might be and however late in the day, Phil makes them happen!”
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