Monitor engineer Gavin Tempany relied on a Solid State Logic Live L550 Plus console to deliver Kylie Minogue's Tension Tour across nearly 70 shows and five continents in 2025.
Kylie Minogue’s Tension Tour was no small undertaking. Her largest tour since 2011, with nearly 70 shows across Australia, Asia, North America, Europe and South America had Gavin Tempany behind the monitor desk, mixing on his personal Solid State Logic Live L550 Plus console.
Tempany is primarily an FOH engineer these days, which makes his commitment to this run all the more telling. “I’ve worked with Kylie for a long time — I absolutely love this tour,” he said. “I mostly mix FOH these days, but I turned down other work to come back to monitors for this one.”
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The show featured four band members, three backing vocalists, Minogue herself and a carefully managed playback rig. Rather than treating Kylie’s six microphones as individual channels, Tempany built a dedicated vocal stem within the SSL console to centralise all processing and aux sends. “If anyone needs an adjustment to Kylie’s vocal in their ears, I can make it from the stem easily and instantly.” The system ran capable of handling 128 playback, keys and RF lines, with around 40 analog mic inputs in use across the tour.
One of the more technically demanding aspects of the show was Minogue’s T-shaped thrust stage, which put her up to 20 metres in front of the main PA — and a secondary C-stage at the far end of the arena introduced delays of up to 170 ms. Tempany used SSL’s Sourcerer source enhancer to manage the resulting spill and intelligibility challenges. “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.”
The L550 Plus also handled over 260 internal signal paths, including 26 shout lines to musicians, vocalists and crew, with FOH receiving three dedicated lines. Integration with the tour’s Riedel comms system ran via Dante. A full redundant setup via SSL’s Blacklight II MADI Concentrator kept both main and backup consoles running live simultaneously — something Tempany is quietly proud never to have needed.
Perhaps the most relatable detail for engineers, Tempany said: “I’ve never actually seen a Kylie show. I’m told it’s great!”
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