Linkin Park commence North American Tour
March 5, 2008

Linkin Park will be continuing their Minutes to Midnight World Tour, which has to date has passed through southeast Asia, Australia, and most recently Europe and UK, where the last 2 shows were held at London’s sold out O2 venue.

The North American leg started in Omaha, NE on February 12th. Pre-production rehearsals took place in Baton Rouge and Lafayette for a week with Ben Cabot, Adamson’s Tour support flying out for initial set-up support. Some of the new technical aspects for this leg of the tour include a brand new, incredibly impressive, fully automated lighting rig. On the sound side, Linkin Park carry on steady with FOH engineer Ken “Pooch” van Druten, whose full Adamson set-up for mains, sides, delays, and front fills, remains as number one on the LP technical rider. Kevin “Tater” McCarthy, LP’s monitor engineer also continues requesting 16 Adamson M15 monitors combined with in-ears, for a monitor rig.

Tour Manager Jim Digby engaged the complete sound rig with full turnkey package from Atomic Pro Audio and the tour production from Audio Analysts, both of whom provided production for last year’s “Project Revolution” tour headlined by no other than Linkin Park. Evan McElhinney from Atomic is manning the tour as the Adamson speaker’s system tech. The total set-up consists of main clusters of 12 Y18’s with an eight Y10 under hang per side flanked by six flown T21 Subs aside. Beside the Main arrays there are 2 flown infill clusters made up of 4 SpekTrix enclosures each. The side P.A. has 16 Y10’s per side, and the delay side line features 8 SpekTrix with SpekTrix waves at the bottom of the array for extreme downward angles. To bring bass to the ground level just four T21 Subs are stacked from L to R. Four SX18’s are placed on stage L and R, facing the stage, to give the band a kickback of their energy.

Racks and stacks fully consist of Lab.gruppen fP7000 and fP10000 amplifiers paired with XTA’s 448 processors.

Atomic Pro Audio will add 24 more Y10’s to accommodate venues sold in 360degrees, which include the stops at the Verizon Wireless Center in Manchester NH, the Madison Square Gardens in New York City and the Labatt Centre, in London, Ontario. The tour will come to an end on March 10th in Sacramento, CA after 17 stops in 13 states and 2 Canadian provinces.

Part 2
From XTA (edited)
April 10, 2008

Nu metal rap rockers Linkin Park released their third studio album Minutes to Midnight in May 2007; it sold over 600,000 copies in its first week of release and topped the Billboard Charts. The band is on a two-month hiatus during their current world tour, of which XTA equipment is part of the touring rig.

The tour began in January 2007 and at the moment looks like it will only end in January next year, taking in the US and Canada, before coming back to Europe in June, the fourth time during this World tour. They will be headlining Projekt Revolution at the Milton Keynes Bowl on the June 29th, 2008.

So far the average size of the venues visited have been around 15,000, but in arenas in places such as Asia, the crowd has reached up to 40,000. Because of the varied sizes of the venues, a substantial amount of Adamson PA is being carried: 24 Y18s, 16 T21 subs, 48 Y10s, as well as 28 Spektrix boxes. “At some venues we were playing end stage, 360 degrees,” said FOH Engineer Ken ‘Pooch' Van Druten. “Every seat in the house was sold out.” The PA design includes a big front hang of Y18s and T21 subs, while the side hangs consist of Y10s and Spektrix.

Legendary Pooch is using nine XTA DP448s and two DP224s to process the Adamson loudspeakers and, when it comes to XTA, he says: “I have used XTA crossovers and EQs for years, for many different bands. It always works, and always works well. “I have used several different types of ‘the other guys' processors from all around the world. XTA always sounds the best. The combination of XTA processors, Lab Gruppen amplifiers and Adamson transducers is my dream PA, it just sounds fantastic!”

Linkin Park fans also know good audio when they hear it. They've started websites dedicated to the Linkin Park sound, like lplive.net for example, as well as the Pooch blog: poochblog.evilentertainment.net. To quote Astat on February 28, 2008, “I'd just like to say I appreciate all the work you do, the live recordings, you mix sound awesome and have actually gotten better with time.”

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