Musicians and dancers and film crews – oh my!

After the relative ease (and eardrum shaking) flamenco show had left, we had one of our bitty weeks – those points in the schedule where no tour or devising company is booked in, and instead we get oddball events.

Two this week – from vastly different areas of the performing arts spectrum.

The first was an evening to celebrate young musicians and dancers working in collaboration under the purview of a new DCMS scheme.

We’re used to having several hundred children descent upon the stage to strut their stuff – it’s not often that they bring musical instruments with them. There were an awful lot of organisations involved yet for the most part, everyone just got on with the show.

Sound-wise, this does enter into one of the those areas where you have to keep a tight reign upon the whole thing. Performers ranged from a choir via hip-hop to a Indian band, and from symphonic orchestra to big band via four piece drum kit ensemble.

Not as musically diverse as it perhaps sounds, it was something of a challenge to ensure that the overall sound picture was coherent while allowing for individual pieces to shine. And the 45 minutes total tech time per piece (which included time needed to set up – and strike – instruments) meant that there was only so much time free to actually listen to the pieces before the audience arrived.

[Shop Talk]

There were performers onstage and in the pit (which was set to auditorium level) and there were something like 18 different groups showcasing their pieces over the night – on the main stage at least; more out front in the foyer pre-show and interval.

Budget was minimal but then the concept was to keep it as acoustic as possible – mics were only initially talked for for speeches and lifting individual instruments if needed.

So up went our standard rig (Max 12 side-fills on-stage with EAW main/JBL delay out front with Martin subs) driven from our Midas Legend, which, for an acoustic show,  was bursting at the gills.

44 inputs allocated in total – two CDs (neither used); two SPX990 (one used for a little reverb); one DVD; one DJ (including his vocals, Technics decks and a Pioneer CDJ); six radio mics for speeches; a spare SM58 for announcements (not used but I wouldn’t have liked to chance not having one for this sort of thing), twenty-one mics on various instruments (most on the Indian band – did someone forget to mention the acoustic thing to them?) and three channels of Soundfield.

The Soundfield mic was our only ’sound hire’ (I’m not going to count here all the extra chairs, drum kits, music stands and so forth).

For those who haven’t heard of the Soundfield system before, this is the link to the one we had in (essentially the most basic).

And for those who want a quick synopsis, it’s a arrangement of mic heads in a single capsule that allow you to get a mono, X-Y stereo, M/S or surround pickup. Plug the mic capsule into the processor and you can change the pick-up ‘width’, polar pattern (from omni through cardioid to figure of eight) and gain remotely.

I choose to run in a M/S pattern to cover the pit from a single source – mainly for on-stage dancers performing with a pit band. Almost all instruments otherwise in the pit were left along – the exceptions were DI feeds from an electric bass and electric guitar, and a keyboard that was just too weedy to be heard above the rest of the big band it was a part of. Most of the instruments onstage were also left unmiked – all the vocalists for the different pieces had their own SM58 and a single cello was also picked up for one section with a C414

The Indian band comprised of nine musicians and somehow had managed to be allowed to be fully miked: 2 flutes on C391, 2 tabla on SM57, 2 veena on pick-ups, 1 violin on SM81, 1 sitar on C391, 1 tampoor on C391, (and tampoor vocals on Beta 58 – we were running out of SM58 at this point ), two drone boxes with a C1000 each and a small choir singing towards a pair of C3000.

Given the choice now, I would have swapped those C3000 for C414 – but the variable pick-up pattern on C414 meant I was holding on to them for last minute mike additions, such as the onstage cello.

There was also a pair of C398 standing by for shotgun use onstage, along with a couple of PCC160 (I very nearly put one of those out for a harp…)

For those who hate C1000’s, you will all be glad to know that the first mikes I put out onstage was a stereo pair of these on a marimba – which had the effect of getting ALL onstage mikes cut (not for long, mind). They also did fine on the drone boxes.

The Indian band also had four Tannoy i8 as foldback monitors, mainly with tabla and drone.

I ended up using 8 aux outs for the onstage speakers, to give individual control on each one, two more for the SPX sends, the main L/C/R outs for the system, a group out for subs, two group outs for a stereo feed to the camera’s recording the event, two more group outs for feeds to the sound recordist from Classic FM.

Again given the choice, I would have separated the main PA from the delays but the matrix outs had originally been allocated for VT sends and we had tech’ed the majority of the pieces before the final VT sends set-up

[/shop talk]

With four monitors and 14 mics it was a good thing that the Indian band started the second act after the interval – pity they were followed by the piece that had four drum kits and a tam-tam. But for the most part the scheduling did pretty well at keeping the large set-ups apart and using speeches to cover turn-arounds.

In the event, I seemed to alternate listening to the live sound and monitoring the VT feed. The Soundfield does what it does very well – but the 10m of cable meant that the processor was buried in the pit so we had to settle for a ‘one size covers all’ set-up where I had been hoping to alter the pick-up pattern piece to piece. If you should get chance to use one of these, ensure that the processor can be reached easily.

I haven’t yet heard the recording to know who it turned out – I do know that while the live sound for the Indian band turned out pretty well, I believe the recorded sound was a little … out of balance.

I’d also suggest to users of the CDJ to check that they are secure – during the hip-hop number the CDJ skipped to the final track. We don’t know the cause but the subs had been moved onto the front of the stage for access reasons and it’s possible that when they were pushed in level during the number, it managed to judder the CDJ (of course, it’s also possible that it was equipment malfunction).

On the whole though, it went very well.

It would have been nice to have had longer tech time for this one – more for the archiving than for the actual night. A second desk hooked up to a multi-track recorder would have been desirable for this, particularly the pieces with instruments around the stage.

A days respite that was mostly spent moving new Source 4 profiles and old Aramis followspots then had us coming in for a film call. A crime thriller writer has her new heroine being shown on ITV1 later in the year and part of the filming for it was done in our theatre.

I’m not going to talk too much about it here (but I’m sure a post will feature as and when it gets shown) but there a dance sequence in it – a duet performed on our stage. Various parts of the foyer also doubled up as press conference rooms and the studio space did some extra audience reaction shots.

My job? Having checked all the spots the day before, I spent a couple of hours hitting play, pause and skip back for the dancers to rehearse before the filming started, then helped the film sound team plug in their laptop for playback then loitered around stage making sure the two dancers and choreographer were happy between takes.

Easy work if you can get it …

Of course there was a full lighting/sound/stage de-rig afterwards before the summer show moves in for the next couple of months.

And the kitchen replacement at home still isn’t finished …

And another speaker box, and another …

So we come back from the holiday and I jump straight into another bout of flamenco foot-stomping.

Not a festival this time – just one company so once it was all in, we could pretty much take a step back and let them get on with the business of showing the show.

[Shop Talk]

In terms of outboard and desk, there were no surprises for the kit-list; a Midas each end (Legend for FOH and a H3000 on monitors); dbx, Yamaha and KT compressors, reverbs and graphics.

For once, all radio were supplied by the company – all Shure tx/rx with DPA mics and for once most of the mics were our own – first time in a while that Neuman didn’t feature. C535 on guitars, SM57/SM58 on vocals/claps/cajon, some SM98 on djembe and perc toys and a mere 12 PCC160 under the floor.

It was the the speakers that had a few variations.

Before I start listing them, just bear in mind that this is a _heavily_ amplified show.

Firstly, onstage, we had the d&b E12s back in. This time, we had six on sidefill duty and performed admirably. I’m loving the light weight, which makes rigging the things so easy. A couple of our Max 12s were used for the instruments and we also used a pair of EAW JF260 flown overhead to reinforce the steps of the dancers.

Then a pair of JF200 were added as additional sidefills for musicians, principlely for steps again. (The JF200 are similar to the 260; they just have a wider 90 degree dispersion)

And the main PA was our standard EAW/JBL rig, supplementing a ground-stacked line array.

Not the Q1’s that we would normally expect though. The company was fairly easy with the ’stage PA’ and we decided to give a different system a try – going, on hire company’s suggestion, with Alcons LR16 units.

Hardware-wise, it’s a like for d&b’s own but without computer interface, the amps were little more than switch on. Even so, they sounded pretty good out of the box.

The biggest disappointment though was that the Alcons LF speakers stopped a little high for our tastes (~47Hz) so we had gone for Meyer USW instead. Nothing wrong with that – other than the USW being too small to support the Alcons bump bar and making the stack more of an L-shape …

[/shop talk]

I’ve said this before but I really can’t understand why a performance that takes the vast majority of it’s audio content from accoustic sources has to be amplified to within an inch of it’s life. All the EAW’s onstage were to provide more foldback of the dancer’s steps – there definitely seems to be a mindset that modern flamenco has to be loud, which is (to me) a detriment. And all the boxes were added during the sound check, after the ‘I need more of him, well if he gets more of him then I need more of them, well, in that case I need more of everyone’ game

We can quite easily get a higher dB measurement for a flamenco show these days than the hip-hop theatre pieces – transients included.

I wonder how short is the life expectancy of a flamenco artists cochlea?