Lostprophets & Series 2

With work on their fourth album currently in progress, in April Welsh metal band Lostprophets took a break from writing and recording to undertake a UK arena tour. And to ensure he could concentrate fully on the band and not worry about what was happening in the racks, the band’s Front of House engineer Doof ensured 10 XTA processors went with them.

The dates, at the Glasgow SECC, Manchester MEN Arena, Birmingham NIA and London’s Wembley Arena, gave the band a chance to blow away the cobwebs, while giving their considerable UK fan base a preview of one or two new songs.

Supplied by UK rental company SSE Audio, the audio system comprised the latest generation Nexo Geo_T NXStream line array, mixed on a Midas H3000 console. But absolutely vital to Doof’s sonic arsenal were six XTA C2 compressors and four G2 noise gates, processors which he freely admits he wouldn’t be without.

 

“Sonically they’re completely transparent and I love the fact that I can do a lot of the EQing on them. The way the filters are set up means I can do all the basic EQ settings on the XTAs, which allows me to be a lot more creative with the EQ on the desk.”

The G2s were used across the drums, while the C2s were used on the bass guitar (which was both mic’d and DI’d), clean guitar channels and keyboards.

“I’ve worked on a lot of things for SSE but I came across XTA’s units by chance, working on something completely unrelated,” says Doof. “And to be honest they were the best I’d ever used.

Of the four dates on the tour, Wembley was the most challenging. But here the XTA units meant that the venue’s acoustics didn’t cause any problems.