Not long ago the legendary rock band Motley Crue wrapped up their final tour. Playing for more than 1.3 million fans over 158 dates across six continents, drummer Tommy Lee, vocalist Vince Neil, bass player Nikki Sixx and guitar player Mick Mars utilized a customized rack by Playback Control to automate the band’s audio, video, pyro, MIDI effects and lighting.
Sixx says the band designed the multi-continent, 150-plus date tour to provide fans with an immersive, 3D experience.
“Our ‘Final Tour’ show was about pairing musical textures with visuals like lighting and fire,” states Sixx. “The Playback Control rig automated these theatrical features and incorporated sound effects created in the studio that couldn’t be replicated on stage. Playback Control helped us to bring our studio on tour, and get elements like the pyro and the music to work together automatically.”
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Playback Control Enriches Motley Crue’s Live Sound
Motley Crue and Playback Control explain that because the band is a traditional rock band with vocals, guitar, bass, and drums, it is sometimes difficult to reproduce specific studio effects in a live setting. Working with Tour Supply, the maker of Playback Control, and Viggy Vignola, the band’s 20-year sound technician, Motley Crue tapped into Vignola’s experience to program its studio sound effects and stage theatrics as part of an automated Playback Control rig.
“I built a Playback Control System for Motley Crue to automate pyro, video, light and audio scenes via timecode, with MIDI program changes for Tommy Lee’s drums,” explains Vignola. “It took myself, Nikki and Tommy Lee about a month to program all the audio in the studio, which was the easiest part of the system’s configuration. The rest of the show, including features like pyro, which would erupt in time with the music, had to be done when they were putting on the final touches.”
Working with Playback Control co-founder and CEO Lance Wascom, all of the tour’s audio, pyro, lighting and other elements were programmed into multiple MOTU Playback interfaces with DP9 software on time codes to automatically trigger when needed during a song without involving the band. Vignola programmed the system to run as many as 24 playback tracks, including two separate time code outputs and eight electronic drum outputs.
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The rig features four master Apple 13-inch Macbook Pro computers to run the software, along with a backup Macbook Pro for Lee’s drum triggers, which were programmed to automatically toggle through effects when necessary. Vignola also programmed wireless MIDI control for Lee’s drum coaster and teleprompter. He points out that a major benefit of the Playback Control system was reliability.
“Playback Control is the most reliable system you could have, which was a top priority for the band,” says Vignola. “Every system is built to incorporate a patented Dual RTR [real-time redundancy] technology that eliminates the standard ‘master-slave’ computer system that doesn’t protect against undetected glitches or outages. Instead, it can incorporate two or more Apple Computers to operate independently, but in sync with one another, thereby creating multiple masters. If one drops out, the other will take over automatically.”
Sixx adds that artists have tried for years to bring studio effects out on the road, and now through the Playback Control system, Motley Crue was able to employ those effects during its live shows.
In the early 1980’s, we tried to find a way to replicate the chopped guitar effect in ‘Wild Side’ live,” comments Sixx. “This effect is a charming part of the song’s sound that needed to be heard on stage. With Playback Control, artists don’t need to worry about how they are going to recreate a sound made in the studio live. There’s a new idea that the studio can go on tour with us, and that idea allows a band to be even more creative during the songwriting process.”
Playback Control rigs can currently be experienced on current tours from Kenny Chesney, Lenny Kravitz, Selena Gomez, and others.
