1073OPX captures the perfect gig for Ringo & Friends at the Ryman

 

A legendary venue, iconic artists, and one of the industry’s most trusted engineers—Rob Dennis captures a once-in-a-lifetime performance with the power of the 1073OPX.

 

Sitting back and reflecting on Ringo & Friends at the Ryman, there is one phrase that Rob Dennis, owner of Rack-N-Roll Audio, uses to describe the experience: “It was the perfect gig, and I don’t think I’ll ever do another one like it”. For someone of Rob’s experience on the road as a touring engineer, in the studio as a producer and supplying gear as the owner of a rental company, that is a big statement.

Rob has worked on several shows over the years at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, and recorded dozens of ‘Live at the Ryman’ records. It is fair to say he knows the room better than most people and understands exactly what it takes to create a live recording in the space that will make people feel like they are in the room for the performance. “I’m blessed to get to work there all the time,” says Rob. “I have to capture the sound of the room and then I have to capture the audience. And I see those as two different things. I have a very involved set up at the Ryman, people hire me to record there because I definitely have a pretty dialed in way to get the sound.”

When he discovered that Ringo Starr was working with T Bone Burnett to put on a show at the Ryman, he was immediately in touch to ensure that he could lend his expertise. Rob reached out to both the Ryman and T Bone Burnett’s team (who he had worked with on many other projects) to make sure that everyone knew he was available and ready to work on the live recording of Ringo & Friends.

One of the factors that made it a perfect gig was the crew-friendly timetable. This included the unusual luxury of the venue being booked for four days. This meant the first day was purely for the load in to make sure all of the vintage equipment was settled and functioning properly. As such, day two was entirely dedicated to rehearsals before the two days of performances. Rob was brought in for live capture of the two performances to create a clean recording that could be used for a CBS broadcast.

With his focus purely on the live capture of the shows, Rob selected the equipment he wanted to use with Neve 1073OPX preamps as one of the core components. Having used the 1073OPX rig on multiple high-profile projects, such as capturing performances from Carrie Underwood, Jellyroll, Keith Richards, Post Malone, Lee Brice, Red Clay Strays and Dusty Slay, it was an easy decision. “We have multiple flight rigs, but with Ringo it was a no brainer, this has to be an Neve,” he smiles.

“What’s more Neve than recording a Beatle and T Bone!”

Creating rigs capable of handling this kind of production is something that comes from Rob’s varied career. “My background is touring, but I’ve been a studio guy for 20 years as well too, so I see the equipment we spec as our mobile recording rig, I’m literally doing the same thing I would in the studio,” he explains. “What I love about the 1073OPX is my ability to do what I call tone shaping. I’m able to saturate the input transformer, drive it a little harder when it is appropriate and then not so much for things that you want to just be beautiful, open and sparkly. It’s fantastic because it has all the controls you need. It has phase invert. It has a high pass filter it has the pad which is super important. But most important to the Neve sound is that transformer on the microphone input, I feel like that’s where the magic is.”

Ringo & Friends at the Ryman is part of a larger project between Ringo Starr and T Bone Burnett that has seen the pair work together on a new album in The Village – Studio Z. This space relies on an Neve G96 (48-channel) Genesys Black console, a solution that benefits from the same preamps as the 1073OPX. This meant that using the OPX rig for the live recording would help to bring the same sound to the broadcast as could be found in the rest of the project.

Rob used eight 1073OPXs to give him 64 channels to capture the band’s microphones at the gain stage. He believes this approach gives him a unique vantage point into how the setup is working and if anything could be improved. “If a monitor engineer or FOH is listening to the soundcheck through their in-ears, they are listening through the console,” he notes. “It has EQ, it has gates, it has compression. So a lot of the time, just being able to listen to the gain, I hear the low-level buzzes and hums that they don’t hear. It means we can have a conversation after the soundcheck and I can help them clean up the mix a little. A lot of the time they love listening in the level of detail I am, but it’s just the mic pre getting the signal, that is all I’m listening to.”

Aside from the quality of the sound, it is the functionality of the 1073OPX that makes it one of the go-to elements of his rig. “It’s all analogue control, you can grab the knob and make the adjustments, but you have an app on your computer so you can store settings,” he explains. “Let’s say I have three acts, a headliner and two openers. I can soundcheck them, save all my settings and literally just hit load when it’s show time, and it populates all my settings from soundcheck. It really allows you to store and save, but you can still grab that big red knob and twist it to make the adjustments you need if say, they start hitting the snare harder when the performance has started.”

The 1073OPX has been a particularly useful tool for Rob. He has enjoyed the combination of analogue and digital with the app and the support he has received from Neve. But perhaps the most important aspect is the sound.

“It’s just kind of the sound of rock’n’roll, it’s the sound of my childhood, you know, the sound of all the records I liked,”

“If there’s obnoxious high frequency stuff, that input transformer just chills it out a little bit. I think it’s how it deals with the top end transients. To my ears, it’s kind of slowing it down a little bit. Sometimes there are mic pres that are extremely fast, and they get all that level transient detail and sometimes that’s not appropriate. And I feel like Neve is fast enough, but it almost slows a transient down slightly in a beautiful way.”

With this project focused on recording for broadcast, reliability was always going to be a key factor. When capturing live performances, the sound is mission critical so Rob has to have full trust in the equipment he uses. Fortunately, the experience he has had with the 1073OPX means he feels completely at ease putting it into action for high profile gigs.

“Reliability is paramount to my remote recording rigs and we have not had one hiccup since owning these OPXs,”

Reflecting on capturing Ringo & Friends, Rob is full of praise for everyone involved. “It was a perfect gig, and it was the only perfect gig I’ve ever done,” he states. “It’s a credit to the whole team involved, everyone was at their very best and they invested in the talent and manpower to put the show on. That was the philosophy, and it worked.”

 

Reflecting on capturing Ringo & Friends, Rob is full of praise for everyone involved. “It was a perfect gig, and it was the only perfect gig I’ve ever done,” he states. “It’s a credit to the whole team involved, everyone was at their very best and they invested in the talent and manpower to put the show on. That was the philosophy, and it worked.”

Learn more about the 1073OPX by visiting the product page here. 

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