Shure Customer Success Stories with Axient Digital | David Byrne

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David Byrne’s vision of a concert tour performed on empty stages filled only with 100% mobile musicians, draped within 125 feet of chain mail and enough musical energy to charge tens of thousands of fans night after night is made possible by Axient Digital wireless technology and Shure in-ear wireless systems.

It was almost a year before the tour started, where I thought the record was pretty much done.
It got delayed, but actually that was kind of good, because it gave me time to think about the concept that I had for the show, which was to have everyone be mobile.

In my head, I could hear the energy. And I thought, “Okay, if we can make this work, it’s gonna be very exciting.”

The journey began last summer to try and find some gear that could actually do 48 channels of wireless with a load of in-ears.

And, “Oh, by the way, once you’ve got all these RF channels, we’re gonna hang 125 feet of chain around the stage.”

I’m John Chadwick. I’m the monitor engineer for the David Byrne tour.

It was a case of phoning around a few industry contacts, saying, "Hey, what have you got coming up? Because nothing that I know of that’s out at the minute can do what we’re actually trying to do.”

Fortunately, my friends at Shure said, "We’ve got something coming out next month that you should probably take a look at."

Axient Digital is amazing. This tour wouldn’t exist without it. I don't think it would be possible.
a.) because of getting the bandwidth that's necessary for that many channels of wireless and b.) because it just sounds so much better than the analog side.

My name's Pete Keppler. I have been a live and studio engineer for, this is my 39th year.

I'm recording every show and I have listened back to several recordings, and mixing a little bit. It sounds amazing. All the high frequency stuff, everything that I would have expected to hear, like little, "oh, that’s not quite the same", I don’t hear it at all. It sounds as good as any wired system I've ever heard.

I get what I think is an exciting mix because we’ve got all the transience from the percussion. We don't lose any of it in companding.

People were saying, "This sound too good for you guys to be actually playing this. You've got tracks. You've got playback happening, right?" And so now we do a thing where we start a song instrument by instrument and people hear how the whole thing fits together.

I've been a relatively long-time Shure user. The software side of Shure, Wireless Workbench, is leaps and bounds ahead of other products.

My name's Jamie. I use Timeline and Frequency Plot to just keep a scan going of the environment throughout the day. And Timeline to see if things are actually dropping out or if someone's just walked too far away.

The battery rack system I knew of from the analog Axient. And when I found out how many packs we were gonna be sending out on a daily basis, which I think we send 66 or 67 packs out per day, I couldn’t really with good conscience use that many AA's and throw them away that day.

And we've done some rough bar math, and by the end of the tour, we’ll have saved around 21,000 AA's from being thrown away.

Even today, I checked on the health status of some of these batteries. We’re over 100 shows now, and they’re still showing 100% health. It's just a good brand. The stuff is built well and lasts on the road.

I know for a fact, things have been dropped, things have hit the floor pretty hard. And we haven't, nothing's broken.

I don't think that we’ve necessarily put it to the use for which it was entirely intended, throwing microphones and transmitters on drums that are being beat on pretty severely for two hours.
There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong. In this case, a completely empty stage, an entire band mobile is a really simple idea. But technically, yeah, not so easy to realize.

Just the fact that they can move around and not worry about dropouts or interference. They pass through the chain. They even do a song encased in the chain, and there’s no issues.
Anything that we throw at Axient Digital, it just seems to work. We're on show 114. We’ve forgotten what normal is.

I don't know what I’m gonna do next. But it's hard to imagine going back to a more conventional setup now. Certainly for me, but I think for others who have seen this show, they're also thinking, 'Woah. He’s moved the goal posts."