layer upon layer of technical fluff

Made a mistake in my last post – I mentioned flamenco and it was like summoning the genie from the bottle …

Flamenco shows for me always seem to start with a month long (or more!)battle to pin down the sound requirements followed by a day of hefting floor.

This one was no different – though it was revisions that took the time. A return of the flamenco show from last September (this post here), this time around we were looking to trim the costs somewhat.

[shop talk]
Our Legend was now in the FOH position with a M7CL in the monitor position – all in-house outboard in use with a couple of extra compressors supplementing. XTA active splits between the desks, the usual suspects for mics, our house PA, Sennheiser IEM’s back in use for the musicians onstage but for radio mic detail this time, we decided to forego our usual 5000 series and instead tried out Zaxcom’s offering.

These proved to be a challenge to work with – though this was partly due to a lack of experience – we did also find that the Zaxcom receivers do not like to be near IEM transmitters; that the CR123 batteries mean that there are quite a few mics that don’t work properly with them (one wonders why the hire company didn’t pick up on this as the Zaxcom were their idea) and that it’s worth remembering that not everyone is necessarily hot on the idea of proper gain structure.

The hire company were very helpful in sending out spares – including an engineer to check things over onsite and it was all up and running well for the show. The Zaxcom are quite small, seem robust and have the nifty feature of being able to record the signal from the pack directly to an SD card – however, I doubt that they will become a regular choice …

For the rest (lights, set, costume) business as usual. The show is still the same as it was – just an attempt to trim the cost a little …

[/shop talk]

And, as I mentioned at the top of the post, flamenco for the last few years has seen me travel down to our stores in deepest Kent to pick up our wooden floor – two pallets each of 1500kg of fun or so. For those who don’t use trucks on a regular basis, tail lifts have a maximum rating of 1500kg and drivers are understandably reluctant to go to close to that limit. The floor is also based on 8′ by 4′ boards – and most trucks smaller than 45′ are around 7’12” wide.
Actually, loading them into the truck isn’t too bad – we can normally wangle the use of a forklift truck at the store.
It’s when we come to unload them that we have to start breaking down the pallets so that the weight (and the sheer mass) of them gets to a point where they can be safely put on the tail lift. And as we always have to deliver early, it then means reassembling the pallets for onsite storage for a couple of days before we can actually get around to laying them down.
Then we have to reverse the process on the get-out, except that now when we get back to stores, the fork lift is almost not needed as we’ve had to break them down to load them back on the truck – particularly gruelling in weather extremes – hot weather turns the truck into a greenhouse and the anti slip coating on the bottom of each of the floor sections sticks to the one below in the pallet stack, while rainy weather makes it harder to work and the water gets absorbed by the anti slip coating on the bottom of each floor section – so they stick.

And yet this is all in a days work.

The bigger issue I have with flamenco remains as it ever does – the insistence of most of the practitioners to add layer upon layer off technical additions to an artform that really doesn’t need it. The two best performances I’ve seen of flamenco over the last six years were the show that had to cut their technical requirements as they were part of a larger festival, and the solo dancer who had a CD and a mere minute of show time.

This is nothing against this particular show – well received by critics and audience alike – but it does get increasingly more ironic that there is also a growing trend to return to the roots of the flamenco artform.

Maybe someone will link the two things together … or I’ll be proved wrong … maybe

Breaking the cycle

The return of a perenial (though not personal) favourite once again sees the floors shake with stamping foot.

It’s once again our springtime Flamenco Festival and anyone whose read previous posting on this will know what to expect (catch up first here, then here)

And why not a personal favourite?

(warning: possible rant ahead)

 We notice here that the Hispanic companies who come in always seem to want a lot of kit for acoustic instruments and the flamenco artists the worse of all. The sound hire budget for two weeks (details in shop talk below) is in the ballpark of the national median average salary – which does include additional onsite engineers for set-up and troubleshooting if needed. But how much money does it really cost to make (on average) two spanish guitars, four singers, one percussionist and foot taps sound perfect? And how much of the audience care, how many would notice if some of that kit wasn’t there and how many just go ‘gosh it’s loud’.

There really seems to be a current expectation of high quality sound equipment being vital to the performance – I doubt very much that microphones and reverb units were that vital until the last decade or so.

I’m not saying that this equipment does do anything – far from it – but the one performance (in 6 years) I’ve been party to that didn’t have a gamut of kit sounded far more intimate and involving and the crowd loved it still.

There’s a little of the self-perpetuating circle in this – ‘well that company had that kit, so we have to have all of that AND this as well’. In fact, there’s a lot of that. As soon as one company adds a new piece of kit, so do the rest

There is certainly a wide variety of flamenco styles – but it all sounds exactly the same. There is a trend for contemporary flamenco groups (and a fair number of other Hispanic bands) to have it obviously amplified.

Obviously amplified acoustic instruments?
I may be missing the point but ” HUH???”

And all this is before any thoughts on NAWR or hearing damage …

(warning: prossible rant passed)

[shop talk]

Despite that huge hire cost, the kit is all pretty much as expected.

There’s still the regular AKG/Neuman/Shure favourites but Sennheiser radio mic packs and Shure wireless handhelds are a lot more prevalent this year with a selection of DPA and Sennheiser caps on the packs. Still the KT active splits to the FOH and monitor desks and still the d&b speakers all round – back to a ground-stacked Q1-series array this year with Q7 as front fill and B2 subs plus C6 for sidefills all with D6/D12 amps. There are several Genelec 1049 for small monitors as the only other brand but several Max 12 are in use as main wedges.

And still the 20 plus PCC-160 laid out under the wooden floor.

The big change is the choice of desks – Yamaha have a clean sweep this year, with a PM5D out front and a M7CL at monitor world. Not something I was expecting but it means we need far less outboard – several graphics inserted over monitor sends (via the expansion card slots) and one each of PCM80 and TC M3000 FX units. The only analog compressors this year are our pair of dbx166A and I don’t believe these have been patched in yet. I’m still surprised that no-one has wanted tube compressors – can the onboard PM5D compressors really equal the sound of an Avalon 737?

All this digital gubbins have meant my laptop has suddenly added R1 for remote linking the amps (supplied cabled up and with CANbus doogle), and up to date versions of wirelessly linking with Studio Manager for the M7 via a router and USB linking the 5D – all mostly for archiving purposes alongside USB stick.
I don’t normally take photo’s of shows (all those copyright issues) but a quick snap of the monitor world set-up for those like blinky lights:

From left to right is one humongous amp rack – that’s one flightcase …
Then part one of the active splits followed by the radio rack on top part two of the splitter rack (multicore to XLR patch).
Past the M7 are the graphic EQ’s, inserted into the desk
Visible also are the cases that our in-house Yamaha amps for our in-house Max12.

Our In-house speakers are being used as additional fills and delays in their regular positions and the MediaMatrix deals with all the processing for these units.

For those who use DPA and Sennheiser radio, we also found this ‘gotcha’ this time around. It seems that older 3063 packs and newer DPA 4067 headsets don’t play properly – something with the impedences means that you hear the compander in the transmitters working under the audio – quite audibly noticeable.

We swopped to 4066 headsets and the results were much improved – then swopped to 5012 beltpacks with the 4066 headsets and all underlying noise vanished. But it took the better part of two days to get to that point – a lucky bit of scheduling meant most of this was during tech turnaround time and impact on the actual show was minimal.

Setwise – it’s another black box set with two wooden floors down – our special flamenco floor and a second wooden floor to protect our sprung dance floor from screws. Individual companies are adding bits on top

Lighting is also fairly generic – no moving heads and minimal scrollers; the concern is definitely on illuminating the area over effect – which is appropriate for the style. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a concept behind it all – rather that the lighting is there so the performers can be seen.

[/shop talk]

The few reviews I’ve seen so far haven’t been as gushing as in previous years – there’s the returning complaint of over-amplification but other elements of the shows have been criticised – enough that only virtuoso performances have provided any value to the show.

To be fair, I’ve been less involved this year than in previous years – the prep admin for future shows is starting to mount up again and the more lenient scheduling has been much appreciated by the staff – having a day or two to turn a blank stage into a rock gig is much more conducive to a smooth running show than going in after a performance of a couple of hundred people and being show ready in less than 20 hours, as happened last year.

The current schedule for this time next year is far less forgiving – several festival format shows in close succession. Of course, we do have two separate large events in the two days immediately following this and two of the shows this year around had 4pm matinees on the day of arrival.

And there have been other moments – the radio mic issue for one.

And the second company (of five companies total) insisting that the floor be set a foot and half upstage of the plaster line – with no other company wanting it there. This meant an extra overnight call for six crew to move the floor – and all those mics underneath – 18 inches downstage.

In any case the floor swop out was far less of an issue during the event – add a row in front, move the first row of floor mics a little more downstage and job done (apart from the other 20 or so sections to be added up stage …)

As it happens, for the show in question the floor would have been fine in the downstage position.
Wonder if this is another of those “HUH???” moments.
I do think sometimes our willingness to go the extra mile is a burden – it is all part of a festival and I wonder if we took a more hardline ‘there is only this’ approach whether we would see any appreciable difference in the performance.

I reckon so – the companies still greet us with smiles and remember our names.

And it could be worse, it could be a succession of one day kid shows.

Oh, that’s next week you say …

Woo.

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 …

What’s the Spanish for ‘this may get technical’ … No comprendo …

More silence from me in terms of blogging – but not more silence onstage as it was once again time for our annual flamenco festival …

Yet again I was not allowed to hide away (though I did try) but had to participate, though this year the preparation actually began a few months ago and the whole thing went that little bit smoother.

Let’s get the tech speak out of the way first:

[shop talk]

This is our biggie for the year in terms of sound hire.

While our Midas remains out front along with a little of our outboard, the vast majority is hired in, meaning we can order it to spec and use in-house for backup for the inevitable damages.

FOH control was all analogue again: alongside our Midas Legend were several models of dbx compression (166A, 160Xt and 1046); M3000, PCm70 and SPX990 effects; KT DN360 graphics; and KT DN410 parametrics. Playback was from our Sony CD-D12, supplemented for one company with the Minidisc equivalents (the first time we’ve seen Minidisc for a while here). Another couple of companies had an Avalon 747 tube amp.

Monitor control was digital – a PM5D-RH with only a couple more KT DN360 graphics for company. This was sat alongside Sennheiser Em3532 receivers picking up Sk5012 transmitters. A pair of Shure U2 receivers shared aerial distribution for a couple of handheld mics (Sm58 and SM87 heads). Monitors were all Max12 powered by lab.Gruppen amps while sidefills were two pairs a side of trusty C6’s (alas no lightweight E12 this time…)powered from P1200 amps.

Bss active splits received all the mic inputs and sent them to both desks. Mics were all fairly standard models – KM184; SM57, 58, 81, 87 and 98; C414’s and AR133 active DI on instruments and vocals for all the companies along with DPA 4065, 4066; MKE2, MKE-40 and ME-140; and the (slightly irregular for us) Sennheiser HS2 on the radio packs. Not forgetting of course the 25 PCC-160 under the floor …

A LS9-16 was also used as a sub-mixer for one percussionist on one night, as much for his Kaos pad as his selection of SM98’s

Of course, this all seems a bit easy so the final company brought a lot of their own monitor kit swopping the PM5D for a DM2000, adding 3063 radio packs and their own 3532 receivers, a bunch of Sennheiser IEM’s (I can’t for life of me remember the model numbers, outboard and MKH70 rifles.

And while we had two BTR-700 packs in, this company brought 8 of the radio comms in (we quietly retired the two we’d run in – which simultaneously deprived the lighting department of using their Pelican case as a footstool …)

The observant, and patient, reader will have noticed that I have yet to mention the PA system.

Indeed, that’s true.

it was again a line array system, it’ll be no real surprise to learn that it was a line array system but a few people may pay attention when they hear that we had the new T-series to play with.

I believe that we are only the second production to use them in the UK (after the Chicago tour) though I’m prepared to be corrected.

Eight T-10’s aside ground stacked with two T-subs and an additional B2 aside for some ‘ommph’ with another four T-10 flown to help out the second circle. All powered from D12 amps.

I’ll talk more about these in a minute …

Lighting wise, the rig was all conventionals and was a mix of PARs, fresnals and profiles covering all the usual requirements.

Staging was black box masking, and varied somewhat production to production but only in terms of where the musicians were. The flamenco floor was removed during the second week and replaced with a companies own version a little variation …

[/shop talk]

The festival, as always, had it’s ups and downs. Loading in the day before was fun as myself and wife number one found ourselves travelling into the murky depths of rural Kent to load our flamenco floor into a truck early one friday morning. On the good side of things, it meant that we were forced (FORCED I say) to have bacon butties and a fork lift was available. On the bad side, the truck wasn’t supplied with entirely the right amount of securing  and it arrived at the theatre a few hours later with the heavy floor having turned some of our rustic wood and rush chairs into kindling …

Really.

I had to sweep the remains out of the truck and the truck didn’t look too healthy either.

Then with the floor out on the pavement, the sound kit boxes started to arrive and we were left under the clouds waiting for the matinee show to finish so we could get everything inside without crushing staff, patrons or the 100+ children who were due to perform that night.

Most survived.

Then sound were called at ungodly o’clock on a Saturday morning to start setting everything up, including a very nice man who was there to make sure the T-series speakers behaved properly.

He also proved most useful when the requested KK-105 handheld was found to not be in the mic case and was in fact in pieces back at the warehouse. After a moment of panic, 87 heads were deemed to be acceptable replacements and we all started breathing again.

Dan, many thanks again.

His help, along with everyone else meant that we went from bare stage to show in around 12 hours (18 if you count the overnight lighting rig).

A different company and show for Sunday and Monday, then another for Tuesday then the first Wednesday was a tech day. Possibly a little late but by then we were on company four and I finally had a couple of days off that weekend, something of a luxury for a festival set-up.

Company five started on a monday which doesn’t bode well and indeed it was one of those days.

Selected highlights for me included waking up with a head cold and blocked sinus’s, getting into work to find we were missing legs for the musicians platforms and going to our other venue a half hour bus ride away while arranging to hire more SM98  mics as we were missing a couple. I was wondering what people were going to make of me catching a bus while carrying 40cm long scaff poles but was spared that as I found the only legs the right size were already in use for a platform for a tango band. I figured they might notice if I dismantled the platform and returned empty handed to the festival fit-up to find the crew cutting long lengths of scaff into short lengths and that we need more SM98, of which we had two in the theatre I had just come back from.

An hour later or so, I returned carrying said mics from theatre, having confirmed the hire of additional mics (and having had the bus driver miss the stop) in my travels.

Sinus’s still blocked and mics still missing, I carried on through the day to the high point of having one of the Max12 get dislodged from it’s perch and come crashing to the deck. Fortunately a stage box and those extra hired mics stopped the floor from getting damaged.

Ho-hum.

Surprisingly, everything had coped pretty well – a couple of pop rivets vanish, a little bit of insulation on one lead and a connector on another was the extent of the injuries.

The missing mics showed up and I was partly to blame – in repairing a couple of issues arising in the first week, I’d left those mics separate to everything else. It took four of us to locate them in the second most obvious place to put them.

That was Monday.

Actually the rest of the week was mostly fine, though the sinus blockage got worse during the week, nothing else did, until I was left with the final treat of myself and the truck driver loading all the sound kit back onto the collecting truck on the next monday by ourselves.

And I was left with the thank-you gift from the company of a metal book mark … words fail me

This bit may surprise some of you – I actually liked bits of this year’s festival.

I’ll give you a minute to  pick yourselves up and re-read that.

To be fair, that was mainly a pre-recorded track used by the last company which was nicely epic in scope and some very good guitar playing. The wailing and stomping, I liked not so much.

As always, I’m left with the impression that flamenco in general, and I include all the different forms that it seems to take these days, wants to turn everything up to 11. There is this urge that ‘louder is better’ and I’m not the only one who thinks, “actually, no, it isn’t”.

There are some great musicians who play at this festival – but all you are aware of is the sound level and not the level of playing. At the sort of levels that seem to be the norm, you may as well use a CD …

It’s a shame as, as proved with the flamenco section during a show earlier in the year (this post here), when the volume isn’t loud, you notice the playing so much more. Flamenco, at least what comes through London, does seem to be very focussed on the technology and does seem to be forgetting the art

Talking of technology, those who read the shop talk section will know that we had a pretty brand new speaker system in and are no doubt wanting to know what we thought. This next bit is going to be talking broadly about speakers – consider yourselves warned.

Firstly, we never had time to spend more than a few minutes actually just listening. And our first impressions actually weren’t all that good.

The T-series is lovely to work with. T-‘are just 11kg and have all the fixings in the unit – none of this faff with different pins that plague v-DOSC array’s. And the rotatable horn without removing the front grille means these things can be used for different purposes very easily.

That being said, I’m not certain that the current flamenco sound is the right application for these. The first listen we properly got left us underwhelmed. The first time we listened to a stack of Q1’s we were very happy. The first time we listened to the T-10’s, it just seemed a little lacking in every respect.

Then we took off all the system EQ that had been applied for the flamenco and added a couple of bits on the D12s ([shoptalk] made sure CUT on all T-10’s, played with the CPL; [/shop talk])

That vastly improved the sound. It is a very nice system and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it again. This is nothing against the settings that our man Dan plugged in on day one – it’s as much about the ‘flamenco sound’ as it is about not having quite enough time to check the nuances of a new system.

But it’s not quite as plug in and play as I would like and the sound doesn’t seem to have the same warmth as d&b speakers normally have. We tend to find that American based speaker systems (Meyer et al) tend to be a little more clinical than the European equivalents (d&b, …) and the T-series seemed to be more crisp than I would expect from d&b (some of those handclaps could take your head off with these!)

I think if I had to between say T-series and Q-series, I’d choose the Q-series. While the T-series are easier to work with physically, the Q-series seemed to be a little more appealing in sound quality. And last time we used them on flamenco, they were pretty much plug and play, involving less set-up time (for us, at least, YMMV)

I’d really like to hear an A/B test of the two (and the next one in London is, of course, on a day that I’ll be elsewhere in front of a computer monitor trying to grasp AutoCAD 2008).

Still carrying on the shop talk theme, there are hints that next year it’ll be digital desks at both ends, which could mean that the only analog bits will be the microphones and the speakers themselves.

I do like the idea of not having to carry heavy outboard racks to the front of house position and being able to sit anywhere in the auditorium and be able to tweak any setting … of course, I’d have to listen to flamenco to do so …

Still, we do still get issues with having two languages being spoken in the same department (the English guy does one thing to try to rectify a fault, just as the Spanish guy tries something else to rectify the same fault …)  and going all digital should help with this, as long as it’s all set-up correctly.

Sound lessons

After a week of early starts to rescue mannequins and a weekend of four shows followed by an overnight get-out, rather than relax, we though we’d put on our yearly festival that puts samples of different dance types onstage.

Readers of the previous years (2008 here and 2007 here) will doubt recall previous issues with archiving. We solved it this year by not archiving it – not actually much of a solution but it did help make it run smoother.

Day one was spent removing the last vestiges of the winter show and getting all the in-house kit up and running, including getting the Midas back in place after it’s sojourn re-installing the magic smoke.

At least, it did for everyone else. I spent the morning trying to fit a square show into a round building … totally different project … but I’m starting to get back into the habit of production meetings … and coffee on account is A Good Thing (TM)

Came back in the afternoon to find that most of it was in (hired kit not having arrived yet) and we switched over to installing an updated audio description setup.

[shop talk]

Previously for audio description we had a Beyer gooseneck (or two) plugged into a Spirit mixer, along with show relay, which sent signal to the infra-red system and a couple of headphones taking a feed from the auxes – which was a little awkward.

We’ve recently purchased a pair of Beyer DT290 headsets and a Samson zone mixer – the headsets so that the describers can keep their hands free to turn the script pages and the zone mixer to route the audio in and out. There’s a compressor alongside it to help keep the show relay feed a little more controllable and it’s all now in a rackmount case so it can be moved about to provide the maximum space for the script.

We’ve yet to use it in anger for description but have had no complains yet …

[/shop talk]

A last sound check to deal with some spurious rattles and we had the evening to ourselves.

Day Two sees the hired sound kit arrive – mostly, again for the flamenco section.

[Shop Talk]

With only one live section and no recording, we again chose to keep it simple and used our standard Midas/MediaMatrix/EAW set-up. Playback was from a rackmount PC running SCS9 with a pair of Sony CDP-D12 as backup. Sidefills for the performers was from two pairs of E12s, stand mounted in the wings (I do like these speakers) and powered by D12s. A single Beta 58 on a stick was there in case of announcements.

A DVD player running through a Panasonic MX-50 and projected through a 5K Mitsubishi on the circle front for pre-show and interval video formed the entirety of the sound we needed.

Until we add the flamenco.

The rider we were working off asked for 7 Max 12’s (Lab Gruppen and Yamaha amps); a wireless 58 (Shure U4D); two DPA 4066, two Sennheiser HS2 (headset mikes on Trantec S5000 wireless); 8 PCC160s for the floor stomps; SM57’s on congas, snare, cello, guitars; SM58 on flute and cajon; Beta 87 on vocal (actually a KMS105 but the 87 was acceptable substitute); Neuman 184s on Hihat and Perc Overhead Beta 91 on Djembe and a selection of DN360, DN410, TCM3000, DPR404 outboard.

The company would also supply a couple of WL93/Shure wireless for more foot action miking.

Accepting the Sennheiser headsets, no real surprises in that list, if a little more rock and ready than we might expect.

And of course, we had to supply all the backline as well (guitars and cajon excepted).

[/shop talk]

With the flamenco channel list and the playback we expected to need, we were already at 39 channels used on our 48 channel desk. Still, we aren’t expecting more channels to be needed, right?

And the first day of rehearsals supported us as that was just playback from SCS giving us time to get all the wireless plugged up, though we didn’t quite get to the outboard rack on Day Two. We’ve had a new sound technician join us so this is proving a good time to running through all those little lessons that help to keep things running smoothly.

Had a day off on Day Three (one of those perks of being employed) and came back on Day Four, three rehearsals to get through and while I was lounging on the sofa watching bad TV and throwing pixelated characters off cliffs on the PS3, the day three rehearsals had seen two more projectors appear on the circle rail, a whole ‘nother mac based playback system taking up residence at the control position and 6 more channels eaten up on the desk.

Ah. Well, we still have 3 spare channels (with a little moving around to utilise the stereo channels)

The first of the days companies were playback – easy. Swan Lake duet – no worries.

The second of the days companies – circus  – were playback  – eas- oh wait, we’ll need to playback from two CD players simultaneously.

That’s fine, tha- oh wait you need to mic up a piano? Which has to move about the stage and get played? (not at the same time). And the wireless handheld needs to go where? Wait, what wireless handheld? (48 of 48 channels for those keeping count). A quick dash to the mic store to grab a couple more PCC160 for some taped action on the upright (not the best positions sound wise but for non-visibility from the audience …) and one of our Sony handhelds and we’re good to G.O.

Let’s hope flamenco doesn’t need any more channels …

Which …

they don’t. Phew.

Day five rehearsals start with a brief run through of traditional ballet (as it happens, another version of Swan Lake – this time not with two gentleman) then the Flamenco machine arrives.

I can hear the regulars to my humble scribblings smiling and settling down to a whole gamut of woes.

Not today.

I’ll let the shock fade before I continue.

The company was pleasant, we didn’t have to chase them to start the sound check, setting the layout was easy and bar a couple of patching snafu’s, everything worked first time. And the snafu’s were not keeping on top of the paperwork, as if often the case.

It wasn’t all plain sailing of course. The requested 4066’s should have been 4061 or MKE2 – it’s a little hard to attach headset mics to acoustic guitars and the engineer and musicians simplified the piece a lot – in the end cutting all the hired wireless, a couple of the Max 12’s, all but two of the floor mics and a couple of the percussion mikes. And the djembe. And most of the outboard (final desk score 38 of 48 channels used).

The stagehand in me, who knows that a swift scene change is coming up, says woo-hoo.

The venue tech in me, who hired the kit, refuses to work out how much money was wasted.

Ah yes, the scene change.

Most of the acts used a black box with black marley, or a black masking with cyc set-up. Flamenco, of course, doesn’t have quite the impact (literally) on marley so we were going to have to switch from laid dance floor to wood floor at some point.

For running the show, the musicians were all set-up on or next to, two platforms on wheels. They performed their section and then the tabs came in. All the mic and speaker cable ran as short a distance as possible to multi’s just upstage of the platforms.  A quick unplug at the stage boxes and placing chairs, speakers, mics and instruments on platforms means that the whole backline is struck inside of a minute including coiling the multicore.

Then the rolls of dance floor upstage of the musicians platforms were rolled in sequence to just upstage of the tabs. A quick bit of  atmospheric lighting then the tabs go out so we can get the dance floor down.

I think that’s it likely the first live scene change most of the audience had seen. The initial smattering of applause dies out and you could hear 1600 people watching a dozen people work in low light to smoothly tape down the 9 rolls of marley we need to cover the stage on a up/downstage arrangement before the tabs return so we can finish setting up the next piece out of sight.

We got applause both nights – if they thought that was good, they should have seen the turn around on this show

I have to say that I actually enjoy live scene changes, when they run well. There’s nothing worse than being onstage and it all going ankles over bottom and it’s great feeling to feel the audience as spellbound as if it was a performance (which, I suppose you could argue it was, in some respects)

The whole weekend went well, with a different lineup of acts across two nights – the hip-hop group who finished act 1 the first night and act 2 the second night particularly going down well. The circus group (them of the extra mikes) also closed the first night well – despite one of them cutting their head open and giving us a chance to practice the first aid skills we had just picked up the week before. See, you never know when …

And the flamenco group, to me, actually sounded pretty good – mainly as it wasn’t amplified to the sky and back. Keeping it at a reasonable level that wasn’t all about getting it loud meant you could hear the musicians playing, as opposed to just hearing them, which made the piece much nicer and enjoyable to watch.

I live in hope that our forthcoming Flamenco Festival will be treated similarly, but I highly doubt it.

In fact the biggest challenge of the whole week, apart from a little nerves over the potentially full sound desk, was the mountain of single cables that linked the inserts to the desk (yep the ones that weren’t used) and left the sound department on their own coiling and taping after everyone else had gone home. It’s that whole cable propagation thing that I have mentioned in the past.

Repeat after me: Looms and multi’s are not bad things …

Cable propagation

Another year, another Flamenco Festival (a quick mention of last years here).

I’ll get the kit list out of the way first then add a few general comments afterwards.

[shop talk]

Same as last year, we have a stack of Q1 and Q-subs powered by D12 amps with our EAW speakers taking a rest. A little extra sub power is provided by a pair of B2s powered from A1 amps and there’s a pair of Max12 speakers helping on front fill duty. I haven’t really had much chance to get out front and have a proper listen this year but I trust that it’s all sounding okay out there …

Four pairs of C6 (P1200 amps here – four of those in a rack are blooming heavy!) are hung from our booms at ear height for side fills and a dozen more Max 12 (powered by a mix of Lab.Gruppen and Yamaha amps) get called into use as and when needed – not as often as you might think in fact.

Monitor duty this year is performed by a Yamaha PM5D-RH – which everyone seems to be picking the basics up of very quickly. Thus there’s no outboard onstage and monitor world is made up of the amps, a large KT DS400 splitter rack and a dozen channels of 3035 receivers.

Again, the radios are seeing a lot of service this year with the DPA 4066 in use for every show and the ME104 doing a fair amount of instrument duty. A pair of Beta 58 UHF aren’t getting much of a look in, though they are serving quite well on cajon duty.

Wired mics include the usual Neuman KM184, and some KSM105 for the dedicated singers; Beta 98s clipped onto most of the percussion (not many ‘palmas’ mics this year – maybe the clappers have been in training). A few SM58 for backing vocals and a single 416 for ambience marks the entire mic collection this year – we are definitely getting less variety than we used to.

The floor has 25 PCC160 underneath this time around – these have been wye-split down to only take up 15 channels – though this didn’t help much when we had to pull up the floor for one day only then return it back the next!

Out front, our Midas is back to it’s normal FOH detail with a rack worth of dbx 1066 and 166XT compressors, and KT DN410 parametrics. A couple of DN360 graphics and a single of each of a PCM70 and TC M3000 on effects (with a PCM80 and our SPX990 enjoying the view). For those who like the shiny factor, a pair of Avalon 737 tube compressors was added after a couple of days.

A pair of Sony CDP-12s were also out there – mainly for sound check and announcement and most of the engineers had their own laptops with RTA and playback software onboard.

And for those who prefer the digital side of things, one show insisted on having an Yamaha LS-9. Fitting it at the sound position was something of a challenge but we got there. Luckily it was only the 16 channel version …

And for the final show, another 8 channels of wireless were added – although these were an EM1046 rack with SK5012 transmitters, rather than the 3063 tx units in use for the rest of festival. Extra DPA 4061 and 4066 mics added to use every channel of wireless bar a single Beta 58 (I’m not certain we ever used the two Beta UHF together)

[/shop talk]

It’s funny but writing out the kit list for the last couple of weeks doesn’t really seem to do justice to the amount of work that goes into setting up and running it in a festival environment. A day of set-up prior to any of the companies coming in certainly helps. Keeping a company in for more than one day also allows time for either lie-in or setting up for a piece later on in the festival.

Having a hires list that wasn’t fully up to date wasn’t helpful but the hire company know that these couple of weeks will involve a lot of me calling up for last minute requests (“I know we have twelve floor mics? Can we have ten more? And another effects unit? Today?”) and they are near enough and large enough to manage this kind of thing.

There are some thing though that perhaps we’ll be trying to avoid doing next year –

Not everything was marked so a couple of the turn-arounds took a little longer than we were happy with. None of us hold with the idea that people should only be allowed to do certain jobs (within reason) but it’s unlikely that everyone will know everything that’s happened. Just sometimes, you are working on something that was set up by somebody else and it just takes that little bit longer to work out exactly what’s going on. A supply of Sharpies and tape for next year …

And, having to have a separate FOH desk for one day can be a challenge if the main desk can’t be removed and the space allocated is a little tight. That was the same show that insisted on removing the flamenco floor (custom made this year) and all the floor mics underneath for a single performance.

If ever a show should have been on the last night and not mid way through …

I believe that the lighting rig (all generics: fresnel wash; PAR colour and profile spot) was re-hung three times over the two weeks – surely a bit of planning in terms of stage layout would have helped with that.

Some things you just can’t avoid – finding out as one show is packing up that the percussion for tomorrow’s show may have gone missing means that some extra work is needed to help get them sorted. And we found that some of the older mics electronic shielding was starting to fail – so replacements are needed.

But then, having a couple of the companies not supplying paperwork until a day or two before their show (and after the festival had started) wasn’t particularly helpful. This was the same company who requested twenty-two channels of wireless two days before their (sunday) show so they could do essentially a musical.

By the time we had properly sound checked all those wireless mics (and completed the focus, and hung the many extra soft goods, and rehearsed the changes), the lass who served as our translator/backup monitor engineer/stage sound tech had an hours worth of run-through to learn the mic moves of a two hour show. Bearing in mind that there were no monitors and only sidefills were used, we were left wondering why the FOH engineer, who knew the show, didn’t just send a couple of feeds from spare auxes (there were five or six free on the Midas for that show).

A cut-off date for riders, I think, and a “sorry, too late” there after. (actually, based on the business we work in, I can’t see that one happening too soon)

And I think every department had to deal with a company that had a relaxed view to taking meal breaks – these shouldn’t be optional.

That’s not to say every sudden thing caught us entirely off-guard – we found out that BBC3 were coming in to record one of the performances only a few days before they appeared. It was, however, a simple matter to put their splitter on top of ours and use the isolated outputs to provide a feed from every channel which they converted to optical and sent it down a fibre optic to their OB truck. We barely noticed them that whole day other than to chat every now and then.

The shows themselves went very well and were well received by the audiences. I still can’t get over the amount of kit needed for what is essentially an acoustic performance – I would like to witness a flamenco unplugged show at some point.

I may be biased there …

Still, it’s mostly over. The clean-up was a little messy. Cable does have a habit of propagating if you leave it along for too long and two weeks of live events mean that there’s a lot of cable left to do it’s own thing. And having to come in the morning after a get-out is always a little painful. (is that my physio calling?)

With the second truck pick-up (too much kit for one), the day after also involved hitching a lift in the truck with one of the guys from the hire company visiting our second theatre space to have a talk about a potential new purchase down there.

Meeting the guys down there striking the surround speakers and returning them to delay positions:

“Morning”

“Morning, what time did you finish last night?”

“Two am. And you?”

“Half one. We did start at eight”

“Hmm – longer out than us. What time did you come in for the show?”

“Two pm. And you?”

“Nine in the morning”

“Normal theatre hours then?”

“Yep”

Stopped to talk purchase options with them and hire company man then nicely head out to box office to pick up a delivery of drum sticks and stagger back to the stage.

Stagger? Carrying drumsticks? How heavy are drumsticks?

Well, according to the delivery label, 200 drumsticks weight 18kgs (that’s about a stageweight and a half in theatre money). And the 500 sweatband that came with them were another 9kgs. And the box had split (a trail of sweatbands behind me)

And when I get back to the stage, I then find that that theatre has borrowed some three-phase cable which I can now return.

Joy.

You get some funny looks on the bus carrying 30metres of 32A TPN+E Ceeform …

Getting back to the main house, I was just about to finish things off when a delivery of flight-cases arrived. And by which I mean actual flight-cases.

Good news: our monitor amps, desk power supply and sound playback system now have cases to live in.

Bad news: fitting rack nuts without the proper tool is a real pain in the, well, fingers. Only two scapes and a blister …

A final bout of paperwork and I clock out – and, as is my want after Flamenco, that’s a week away from the office.

I’m setting my alarm for the weekend …