Gavin Tempany deploys SSL L500 Plus for Kylie Minogue tour

Across the first eight months of 2025, Kylie Minogue headlined her longest tour since 2011. Monitor engineer Gavin Tempany describes how he mixed monitors on his Solid State Logic (SSL) Live L550 plus.

“I’ve worked with Kylie for a long time — I absolutely love this tour,” said Tempany, speaking at the end of the UK leg of the tour. “I mostly mix FOH these days, but I turned down other work to come back to monitors for this one.”

Solotech provided production for the tour, while the main L550 Plus was Tempany’s personal console. “It’s the same desk I used with Tom Jones last year. I know it inside-out, and it’s rock solid.”

The show featured four band members, three backing vocalists and track playback — as well as Minogue herself. “Playback is mostly transitions, effects, and ear candy — most of the music is played live,” Tempany explained. “People often underestimate pop singers, but Kylie is a phenomenal vocalist, and her backing singers are exceptional.”

Six different coloured microphones were used by Minogue throughout the two-hour show. Tempany created a dedicated vocal stem within the SSL console, rather than managing each microphone individually. “All levels, processing, and aux sends live in one place,” said Tempany. “If anyone needs an adjustment to Kylie’s vocal in their ears, I can make it from the stem easily and instantly.”

The L550 Plus was connected to dual ML 32.32 MADI stageboxes, a single DL32:32 stagebox for AES feeds to the Wisycom in-ears. Playback and keyboards routed via fibre from the stage through sme Directout M8 MADI converters. “We’re capable of running 128 playback, Keys and RF lines. As for mic inputs, we are capable of ​ 64 inputs and 64 analogue outputs. We were using around 40 analogue mic inputs on this tour.”

The scale and complexity of the production meant that monitor mixing and the show’s Riedel communications system were closely linked. “In practice, the monitor desk becomes the point where musical monitoring and human communication overlap,” Tempany said. “There were an unusually high number of interactions between the monitor system and the show comms on this tour.”

The SSL console handled more than 260 internal signal paths. This included 26 shout lines to musicians, backing vocalists, tech crew and production departments.

FOH received three discrete lines: a tech line, a band-and-tech line, and a dedicated FOH-to-monitor hotline that remained live at all times.

SSL console and Riedel system integration was handled via Dante. This enabled the show caller to speak directly to key personnel, including Minogue, the musical director and the crew.

“The flexibility of the SSL routing meant I could accommodate those interactions cleanly, without compromising anyone’s monitor mix.”

Custom GPIO hardware was also deployed to streamline specific comms interactions, allowing for tactile control over selected talk paths during the show.

Frequently, ​Minogue performed far in front of the PA on a T-shaped thrust stage, sometimes over 20 metres beyond the main hangs. “When the PA is sitting at 103–104 dB at FOH, that’s a lot of energy hitting an open vocal mic,” Tempany noted.

At the end of the arena, a secondary C-stage introduced delays of up to 170 ms. Tempany used SSL’s Sourcerer Source enhancer with fast release settings to manage intelligibility. “It subtly ducks her vocal on her vocal stem during non-vocal sections — only about 5 dB —, but it makes a huge difference to clarity and comfort for everyone,” he said. “It makes playing in time with these distances easier. ​ I decided early on to do all processing on the console with no outboard gear to make any console swaps quick and seamless”

The LL50 Plus’ mirrored front-panel inputs (channels 15 and 16), combined with the Spectra-laser spectrogram and FFT analyser, enabled Tempany to audition and analyse in-ear mixes without external software.

“On the front of the desk, there are some convenient XLR inputs. I’ve used one for my talkback mic and the other for an analyser mic. I built a little adapter that goes between the earpieces and a reference mic. As this mic is permanently patched, I can instantly check phase, frequency response, or troubleshoot issues with any of the earpieces, even mid-show. Super useful and fast.”

The two-hour production ran to timecode, with song and section changes driving SSL scene automation.

“The boss has so many hit songs, we have to perform a lot of medleys. ​ Scene recall has to land exactly and consistently on cue,” Tempany explained. ​ “Having said that, each show had a different request section out at the C-stage, so I was able to use the ergonomic layout of the control surface to quickly make changes to cover these fully acoustic and improvised moments.”

SSL’s Blacklight II MADI Concentrator was also used to enable a fully redundant setup with main and backup consoles running.

“Both desks are live,” said Tempany. “The online one handles gains and outputs, but if anything goes wrong, I can pull a fiber and the B desk takes over instantly. They’re synchronised to timecode, but completely independent. I’ve never needed it — and that’s wonderful.”

“To keep the super clean look of the show, I’ve mixed monitors from the most unusual places…Corridors, loading docks, dressing rooms— you name it,” he continued. “On this tour, I relied on a multiview (or as I like to call it, a ‘MegaSplit’ ) ​video feed from the video department. Kylie rarely speaks directly to me during the show — she’ll signal through one of the backing vocalists, and they have a direct hotline-to-monitor-world.”

Despite having worked on Minogue tours for years, Tempany admitted, “I’ve never actually seen a Kylie show. I’m told it’s great!”

Images credit: Chloe Irving