Ed Sheeran uses Digital 9000 for his vocal, loop vocal and guitar (Photo Credit: Christie Goodwin)
Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran’s latest UK tour, although not lengthy, was incredibly successful with 400,000 tickets sold over his two weekend appearances at London’s Wembley Stadium and Dublin’s Croke Park. Pretty impressive for one man and a guitar. Supplied by production company Major Tom, Sennheiser’s 2000 series wireless monitors and its flagship Digital 9000 Series microphones were in use throughout; with the latter, according to front-of-house and monitor engineer Chris Marsh, having revolutionized Ed’s sound.
Chris decided to change out microphones during Ed’s last U.S. tour, using Digital 9000 for his vocal, loop vocal and guitar. “We had been looking at ways of moving Ed’s guitar away from being wired, but we hadn’t found a good enough wireless system for him to lose the cable, which he’d been using since the very beginning. That was until we tried Digital 9000; unlike others we tried, we found it sounded even better than the cable,” said Marsh. He continued, “From an audio point of view, his vocals became a lot more prominent and his guitar sounded more natural. On top of that we’ve been doing stadiums, so having something that has such strong RF capability made a real difference. It meant that Ed could be up to 50 meters away from the receivers and still have rock-solid reception. It’s made a really big difference to the show and to Ed’s ability to move around the stage.”
“We use a great combination of equipment, all serviced by Major Tom,” Marsh recalled. “We’ve been traveling around the world with it for the past 18 months and it has stood up to everything we’ve thrown at it, performing faultlessly throughout.”