The Bellamy Brothers play on with Danley
- Details
Recently, The Bellamy Brothers’ tour manager Tim Thomas had sold the stereo Danley SM80Fs he brought to all the brothers’ shows via his production and installation firm, Show Pro of Nashville after the kit impressed a club owner, who offered to buy it on the spot. Thomas had also already ordered a larger, more modular system from Danley.
“We always travelled with a pair of Danley SM80Fs, which integrate a subwoofer into the full-range SM80, but I didn’t pull them out if the contract was paying someone else for production,” Thomas explains. “That was the case at a show in Kansas. I was promised a state-of-the-art FOH system, but since this wasn’t my first time at the rodeo I was, by default, sceptical. The logistics worked out that we didn’t have long to set up before doors, and the system was terrible.
“It didn’t take long to realise that no amount of processing was going to improve the situation, so I brought some hands to our trailer and brought in the Danley SM80Fs. We mounted them on some road cases, and I already had my Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifier in the rack, so we fired up. Of course, they sounded phenomenal like always and everyone in the room, including the owner, recognized the sonic gulf between the house system and the Danleys. At the end of the night, he offered to buy them right then and there. Since I already had plans to shake up my Danley rig, I went for it!”
These days, Thomas travels with a pair of massive Danley SH96HO full-range loudspeakers, complemented by a pair of Danley TH118XL subwoofers and two four-channel Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifiers with onboard DSP. That rig covers him for large outdoor events. For the 1,000 to 3,000-person venues that the SM80Fs had been so perfect for, Thomas now has a pair of Danley SM80s (no built-in sub) that he can pair with the TH118XLs. In addition, the SM80s will serve as side-fills for large outdoor shows.
Coincident with, but unrelated to all of that FOH turnover, Thomas talked the Bellamys into trying Danley SM80M monitor wedges. “They were fine with their old monitors of 13 years, but I always had to run parametric and graphic EQs to get them close to decent,” Thomas says. “They only ever let me know if things were really terrible. Nevertheless, I thought, ‘sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing,’ and gave them the Danleys. They were blown away by the definition of the rest of the band and their vocals. So now the crowd is happy, the brothers are happy, and I’m happy. Spoiled really!”
(Jim Evans)
