We were contacted by James Towler who is Steve Winwood’s Front of House, Studio & Tour Manager. James very kindly offered Mike ‘chocolate’ in the form of an invitation to come and see Steve and his band play live. So we recorded Monday’s podcast early so that I could go and see them at The Lowry in Salford as well as ‘geek out’ with a tour of the rig and experience the sound check. 

James has been working with Steve for 17 years and for the last 4 has been mixing on a Venue Profile desk and uses a Thunderbolt HD Native box to record the soundcheck and the gig onto a Mac Mini in the FOH rack, which he screen shares to a Macbook Pro to control the Mac Mini. He is a great fan of Audix mics and uses Millenia mic preamps on stage as well as a number of small sE Reflexion Filters and several sE VR2 Voodoo mics.

Steve and his band played for 2 hours straight through and it was stunning. James was kept busy tweaking the balance throughout the show, with the added challenge of having to work round some substitute plug-ins because he had suffered some licenses disappearing off his iLok. 

Thanks to James for the invite and to Jason Jervis for the photo. You can follow his blog here.