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?