Fred Again FOH engineer Jamie Tinsley on how Fourier Audio & DiGiCo combo “brings the studio on stage"

Over the years, UK-based audio engineer Jamie Tinsley has made the transition from studios to live-system technician to monitor mixing to front of house. They’re different worlds, he concedes, but that doesn’t mean they need to sound differently.

After studio work with artists like Florence and the Machine at Antenna Studios in London, he hit the road as a system tech, touring with the likes of Sam Smith, Duran Duran, and Kylie Minogue.

He also mixed monitors for Will Young, Two Door Cinema Club, Rag’n’Bone Man, and Rudimental before landing in the FOH seat for the two-time Grammy Award winner Fred Again, who wraps up the US leg of his 2024 tour this month.

What’s made a huge difference on this tour, and what’s enabled Tinsley to get closer to bringing the studio on stage, has been the addition of the Fourier Audio transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plugins in a live environment, bringing premium studio software to live sound applications.

Tinsley is currently pairing the transform.engine with a Britannia Row Productions/Clair Global-supplied DiGiCo Quantum338 console, which shares an Optocore connection with an identical desk in monitor world piloted by Andy Knightley.

According to Tinsley, the result of using the new Fourier Audio device has been transformative, allowing him to bring some of the same plugins used in the studio to the artists’ stage shows, helping more authentically recreate the recordings live. 

Before the transform.engine was launched, he says he had been using “super-power-hungry” mastering plugins on a new M2 Mac laptop via the Live Professor app. However, the large buffer sizes required and concomitant latency issues caused insurmountable problems during live shows.

As an example, he points to Soundtheory’s Gullfoss Live, which he specifically uses to help to provide more clarity in rooms with bad acoustics by removing some of the resonances that become accentuated by long reverb times.

“During certain shows, part of the system design required having Fred in the coverage zone of the main PA; however, with these plugins on, it instantly induced additional delay added through my Mac mastering system on top of the large timing discrepancy from his physical distance from the PA,” he explains. “That delay would be extremely disconcerting for the artist on stage.”

Thus, when Tinsley first heard about the transform.engine, it sounded as though it could solve all of those issues. And it did, he says, calling it “a product that the industry has long been waiting for.

“Finally, a host that was able to run my plugins non-stop with no issues, no audio dropouts, and next-to-zero latency. I can flip the bypass in and out on my Quantum338 on any of them without hearing any timing slip. The transform.engine’s simple and quick GUI has given me the ability to quickly whip up a subtle and stable TAL-Chorus-LX or Soundtoys MicroShift onto my vocal bus with confidence. After a few seamless days in rehearsals, running everything non-stop, it was clear that the box was stable, which gave me confidence to use it live.”

As importantly, the transform.engine lets Tinsley use the plugins he needs to manage the PA’s reach, such as Gullfoss, allowing artists like Fred Again to roam the stage and maximise their performance.

“It’s an absolute game changer for adding beautiful width and presence that sits your vocal on top of any mix but without adding additional delay, which can be disorientating for the artist when ambience mics and PA bleed are mixed into their ears whilst they’re talking or singing,” he says.

“The transform.engine allows me to bring the studio to the stage while at the same time allowing me and the artists to use the entire stage without limitation based on the PA coverage. It’s quite brilliant!”