What delivery?

Another week, another show. (there will be some tech speak in this post – yes really!)

You can always tell when it’s going to be a long week when you arrive at work on a monday morning to be told that your delivery has just turned up and your reply is “what delivery?”

Actually, that was half of the delivery. The digital sound desk that had been doing FOH duties on last weeks show (a Yamaha DM1000) had to go back to the warehouse to have it’s cards reconfigured for use as a monitor desk.

FOH sound duties are this week are under the care of a Digidesign Venue D-Show – a desk that has some similarities in appearance with the Death Star controls but does come with the very funky Vegas mode for that ‘blinky light’ moment

The band consists of a string quintet (2 violins, 1 viola, 2 cellos), flute, male and female Indian vocals (it’s a different singing style to Western Voice which is why I’m mentioning it), and 2 percussion (one Indian on tablas, darbuka and one western on cajon, kick, cymbals and taiko). Microphones aren’t all the usual suspects - sure there are the 57’s and 98 on perc but strings are close miked with AT caps, not DPA, overheads are on a more modern equivalent of a RE20 or ATs version of the C451 on the strings – I’ll try to grab model numbers and pix before the show moves on.

 Onstage, there is also a Trantec S5000 radio mic system with DPA 4060 caps for the twelve singers. The PA is all our in-house system with a pair of E9s onstage for monitors (and E3s ready to added if needed). Musicians are either using a mix of Tannoy T12s and Max 12s or Formula Sound personal mixers.

As both desks are in fairly simple configurations, we’ve also got a separate Spirit F1 with a couple of our in-house Sony handhelds for use on announcements and the post-show talk.

 The show itself is a staging of an epic Indian poem – and one that the majority of our staff were having problems saying last week (and, for that matter, this week also). A curved cyc provides the backdrop with a metal fronted ramp curving round in front of it. A tower and return wall in the same material is CS for the first act – these are replaced by a “moon surface” truck for the second act.

There are four kabuki drops which are a little noisy on the release but work very well (when loaded properly) and many silks stretched across the stage to serve as beams of light, the Ganges, a sari and what I’m going to call embellishments.

There had been a frame work for raising and lowering these silks above the performers heads but this hasn’t been implemented. No idea why, if I haven’t been plugging cables in, I’ve been working on last minute hires for a one day gig next week.

4 projectors -two Barcos and two Panasonics – are linked as pairs running from a G5 and controlled via Catalyst. This hasn’t always played nicely with our LX Ethernet and the network has crashed a couple of times during the tech run (well, tech stagger). Of course, once this was the vidiot browsing the network to see what was there. Sigh.

No moving heads and, for once, no HMIs; just a bunch of parcans and fresnals, most with CXi or Rainbow scrollers colour washing the set which takes colour very nicely. I really do need to get photo’s to show this staging off.

The show itself is pretty impressive; though not quite as impressive as it will look once it’s had time to bed itself in and iron out the kinks