Of all the awards …

A quick little update about the Butoh piece we had in a couple of weeks ago.

The Guardian run their 2008 Arts review this week and in Judith Mackrells section on Dance was the following:

Most surprising performer:

Butoh troupe Sankai Juku’s super-obedient peacock.

 

Our thanks go to 1st Choice Animals for the peacock hire

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 …