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Fourier Audio transform.engine brings processing to Hans Zimmer Live – TPi

Vaseline November 19, 2024

Fourier_Zimmer — “They have clearly thought long and hard about creating a product that not only works in the showroom, but also performs well in the field,” says FOH engineer and systems designer Colin Pink. Photo: Craig Mitchell

Award-winning film composer Hans Zimmer delivered his Hans Zimmer Live tour to North America this fall with arena dates in the United States and Canada, supported by Orlando, Florida-based LMG Touring.

The audience joined him on a journey through a series of beloved scores from the multiple Academy Award and Grammy winner’s career, including Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Interstellar, The Lion King, The Last SamuraiAnd Dune. “I am thrilled to return to perform in North America with my amazing band and am excited to share this phenomenal show,” Zimmer said on his tour’s website. “In the end, the music connects us all, and I promise you this: we will always do our best, straight from the heart.”

Helping Zimmer and company make that artistic connection was the sound of the performance, which approached studio quality. That’s because the tour’s L-Acoustics K1 PA system benefited from studio-level processing, thanks to the integration of Fourier Audio’s transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plug-ins in a live environment. to perform, providing premium studio software for live sound applications.

“The transform.engine gives you the flexibility to use any plugin you want,” says Colin Pink, FOH Engineer and System Designer. “In the past with plug-in servers you were quite limited by brand, and that’s why this is such a game changer, because you can use almost any VST3 plug-in you want and get the full functionality of each plug-in, with almost no latency.” In fact, the tour used two transform.engines: one as the primary and one combined with the redundant B engine on Pink’s DiGiCo Quantum7T FOH console.

During the trek, Pink used TC Electronic M6000 reverb and mastering plugins, and the transform.engine allowed him to utilize them to their maximum potential. “Many engineers put a mastering chain on their master bus before it goes down,” he explains. “I tend to treat these symphonic shows very differently, because you have a band, percussion, an orchestra and playback, and they all have very different dynamic ranges. I have four separate mastering buses to match the dynamics of each of those sections so you get a cohesive whole. If you only run one through, you tend to crush the drums too much or not bring out enough low-level detail in the orchestra. Keeping it separate gives you much more flexibility to adjust the dynamics of each section. And it’s more important in a kind of hybrid orchestral band show than if you just stick to one genre. Since I have multiple plugins on the transform.engine, I can access every aspect of these processors at any time. I don’t have to worry about the bandwidth. That is a huge advantage.”

“And if you were in a studio, you would never put a microphone closer than five feet from a violin,” he continued. “Live you need a lot more control and you want to limit leakage as much as possible, so you close everything on the microphone and use clip-on microphones. The problem with doing that is that you increase the dynamic range of that instrument disproportionately to what your ears expect an orchestra to sound like. So I use the FabFilter Pro-Q 3 plugins quite often to calm the dynamic range, and the transform.engines are great because they have enough processing headroom to allow you to use quite a bit of processing without running out of power gets seated. Overall, it’s great to have dual power supplies, along with main and redundant Dante networks. They have clearly thought long and hard about reliability and flexibility to create a product that works not only in the showroom, but also in the field.”

Pink just started using Fourier Audio’s new Cuelists feature, part of the transform.engine v.1.2 software update. He added it towards the end of the North American tour, but immediately saw some benefits from it. “Cuelists is a great feature,” he agreed. “It gives you great flexibility as you can seamlessly change the parameters of your plugins, manually or automatically, meaning you don’t have to think about it during the show, freeing up time for the important work of mixing . For that reason alone I would say Fourier Audio has a great product here.”