Silence is golden

Typically it goes from one extreme to the other.

After the demand for noise with last weeks flamenco, this weeks continental visitors required no noise at all.

The choreography demands that the dancers take cues from the breathing of the other performers – which can be surprisingly hard to make out over air conditioning, rack fans and a thousand people watching your every precise move.

Kinda a shame then that the rackmounted control equipment for our powered flying system has a number of fans that very definitely don’t run on silent bearings …

[shop talk]

We’ll start with sound as I’m already touching on the issue.

Once again we’ve swopped out our EAW JF260 with d&b E12. They sound better, are much much lighter and have lots going for them, apart from the hire cost, of course. The rest of the system is our usual in-house set-up other than the desk which is a DM2000, another regular kit visitor.

Monitors this week are being done by a pair of flown Q-10’s from upstage and a pair of our Max 12’s downstage.

Staging is black box and black marley with a large number of wooden chairs used by the dancers during the piece.

There’s a fair bit of lighting about the place – bar height is less than 6m, short for our stage and there’re a fair amount of lights on floor stands and short standing scaff poles.

This company showing two pieces on our stage this time and the second piece has even less lighting – flourescent fixtures predominant, including tubes that live and switch on at a 19m flown height – illuminating the mostly bare stage that is required for the second piece.

All the chairs are replaced by a baby grand and a few small flats with the rear facing towards the audience.

[/shop talk]

Both pieces use a lot of repetition and can be challenging to watch if you don’t have a high boredom threshold – the critics were split fairly evenly and we managed to get walk-outs – and let’s be honest, people walking out of a show is a bad thing. Despite sayings to the contrary, I do suspect that bad publicity is worse than no publicity in this case

No frontiers may be all seen before

it may say flamenco without frontiers on the tin … for us it’s just another show.

It starts as any newly devised show starts with tech requests coming in last minute – never the best idea over bank holiday weekend.

Still, hire companies are used to the score with flamenco shows so the last minute requests for kit are taking on board without missing a beat (I worry sometimes if our PITA fee goes up on these gigs …)

[Shop talk]

Despite being for one company and not several, this ends up being equivalent to our standard flamenco rig.

Five elements of Q1 on two Q-subs ground stacked to each side of the pros with a single C690 on front fill – all powered from D12 amps supplements our in-house EAW rig with our Max 12 on sidefill detail onstage for the few dancers.

Control is our Legend out front with a whole heap of dbx compressors and Lexicon, TC and Yamaha effects. Playback is from Macbook – though I never caught which software was in use. Graphics are KT DN360 – which I have to admit I’m going off – not from the sound but that I don’t entirely trust the input connectors – there never seems to be a catch and there’s far too much play with the connector for my liking. We dropped a hire company for a time because of these but I’m starting to see that with other hire, which makes me wonder about the quality of the build now (and brings that hire company back onto our list)

Monitors are mostly in-ears this time around – Sennheiser packs with Shure ear buds – and it does make the stage volumes a lot easier to deal with.

This is particularly useful as the ArrayCalc shows an awful lot of low end spilling from the stacks. There’s not much we can do from these – getting an extra Q-sub a side would allow a CSA set-up which would work wonders there but would then raise the high elements above the stalls. The engineers on flamenco seem to be able to deal with the low end so we go with it for now … for now.

Anyways, monitor desk is a H3000 with outboard as per FOH. The majority of mics are DPA4067 and 4061, the cardiod pattern preferred for more control on the pattern . All are on Sennheiser 5012 packs. The few wired mics in use for performers were SM57, SM91 and SM98, mostly on percussion instruments. A mere four PCC160 along the front and two MKH60 for the stomps – far less than the 25 we normally expect.

FOH desk was full to the gunnels (sp?) and even the larger monitor desk was getting a workout. bss active splits took all inputs to both desks and to the multi-track recording that took place each night. And we even had to break out our small 12 way LA Audio splitter once the company added extra channels of mic. The LA Audio MS1224 normally gets used so we can monitor our in-house Sony radio mics so it was nice to actually use it in anger, for what I think is the first time of supplying phantom power.

Set was the standard flamenco floor screwed into a second floor laid on top of our none shall screw into sprung floor. Musicians were arrayed in a semi circle with traditional flamenco one side and Venezualan on the other. Upstage were a number of banners in white and primary colours which were flown in and out during the show and were lit in a variety of colours, ‘overwriting’ the base colour as desired.

Lighting was a little more involved than the standard top and sides – mostly due to a batch of MAC600s. Other than control from our ETC Eos, and some incidents with Gateway PSU’s blowing up, I can’t say much on lighting – I’m normally a little busy …

[/shop talk]

The show itself was pretty good – not as overbearing as we expect from a flamenco show but still more amplified than I think such a show requires.

I mentioned in shop talk that it was traditional flamenco arrayed against venezualan instruments – guitars and cajon against cuatro and tambora (which is was) but I also remember reading somewhere that the cajon has only been in the flamenco tradition since the 1970s … long enough to be a tradition but I wonder now what they used before.

The two styles seemed to mesh reasonably well to me (as they should) though the critics didn’t seem to think as much of the non-Flamenco parts. I wonder if the presence of non-flamenco show  took them by surprise – despite the title of the show. It was a to and fro musical exchange with the obligatory mash up at the end, though that didn’t detract from the show.

For us all these show reinforce is the necessity of pre-planning, tidy install, GOOD labelling and quick thinking.

And earplugs.

It does always leave me wondering though why shows that place such importance on the sound (and rightly so) bring only one engineer. They don’t expect the engineer to be in two places at once (not always anyway) so why not bring monitors and FOH. I would have thought the extra cost would be worth the investment for ensuring the show always sounds it’s best. On this occasion, our in-house engineer had worked with the company before and the show was well-received.

Ah well, another one gone and more to come …