Canada - Gil Perron lit a special, private show by the award-winning Italian trio Il Volo at Montreal’s Teatro Leonardo DaVinci. Although rigging was a lot easier at this beautiful facility, the design team had to be much more mindful of load capacity. This was “sort of a big deal” for Perron, given his penchant for grouping fixtures in clusters to create unique multi-directional light angles. “It’s kind of my thing; I like clumping fixtures in groups of three and then layering them vertically and horizontally,” he said. “This is tougher on a fly system than on truss, but it’s well worth the effort. Doing this, I can use colour theory to create either triadic or analogic colour complementariness. “Working with another proponent of colour theory, our programmer/operator Guy Laflamme, made this a lot of fun - you pick the primary and then, as if by magi
USA - Last year, César Benítez Seilhamer became a fan of KLANG’s approach to immersive in-ear monitor mixing on a co-headlining tour with Latino superstars Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias, using a DMI-KLANG card mounted into one of the slots on the back panel of his DiGiCo Quantum5 console. And the shows keep getting bigger - Martin is doing a series of one-off orchestral dates this year, including two recent nights at the Hollywood Bowl with the 100-plus-member Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in July - but Benítez has a new way to keep up with that, as well as giving the artists and musicians the most effective sonic environments possible on stage. His solution is the new KLANG:konductor immersive in-ear mixing processor. Able to deliver 16 immersive mixes and process 128 input signals at up to 96kHz at an astonishing internal latency of less than 0.25ms, th
The Netherlands - Heerlen hosted the 10th edition of ParkCity Live on 16 and 17 July 2022. Headliners on the main stage on Saturday night were BLØF and Limburg legends Rowwen Héze, while Sunday night ended with performances from Danny Vera, Anouk and renowned Dutch DJ duo Lucas & Steve. The main stage featured lighting provided by Ampco Flashlight Group, while spectacular lighting effects for the tented dance area were provided by SLF Group. ParkCity Live is an event that's gone from strength to strength since its inception in 2010 and this edition welcomed around 35,000 festival goers over the course of two days. For the main stage, 24 iFX-640 effect moving heads by Infinity were used. These versatile light fixtures ensured that the main stage was illuminated with an ever-changing variety of colourful light effects. For the tented dance area, SLF Group us
UK - London's first permanent digital immersive arts experience, Frameless, will be opening in October in the heart of London’s West End. Frameless has partnered with projection technology provider, Panasonic, who will use the venue as their global flagship showcasing their projection technologies and large format displays. Creative Technology, have also been brought on board to deliver integration services for all video systems across the attraction. Using over 50 of Panasonic’s 3-Chip DLP laser projectors, the art projections inside the attraction will be delivered by 479m pixels and 1m lumens of brightness and colour, to give ‘a truly stunning image’ quality across all four immersive galleries as well as a fifth gallery dedicated to corporate and educational events. A second layer of audio immersion is achieved by 360-degree surround sound played over 158 l
Austria - Sting visited Eisenstadt during his My Songs Tour and performed on 15 July in the grounds of the Esterházy Palace Park in Vienna. With him on tour were Austrian Audio mics. Since all Austrian Audio mics are hand-made in Vienna, it’s an actual homecoming for the OD505, CC8 & OC818 mics, used on backing vocals and guitar amps. Sting: My Songs is a special performance featuring the 17-time Grammy Award winner's best-loved songs, like Englishman in New York, Fields Of Gold, Every Breath You Take, Roxanne and Message In A Bottle and many more. Sting performs live, accompanied by an electric rock ensemble consisting of: Dominic Miller (guitar), Zack Jones (drums), Rufus Miller (guitar), Sting (bass), Kevon Webster (keyboards), Shane Sager (harmonica) with Melissa Musique and Gene Noble (backing vocals). Sting’s FOH engine
Europe - Located at the intersection of France, Germany and Switzerland, the Basel Train Station (Basel SBB) in Basel, Switzerland is a primary hub for travel throughout Europe and is often regarded as Europe’s busiest international train station. With high background and travel noise compounded with highly reflective ceiling and walls, announcements were hard to understand, resulting in traveller confusion, missed trains and unnecessary congestion throughout the station. To combat the acoustic challenges Basel SBB faced, Renkus-Heinz Iconyx Compact loudspeakers were installed to aid in delivering intelligible announcements for passengers and staff. Travellers are inundated with a wide range of sights and sounds as they pass through any busy transportation hub: arrival, boarding and departure announcements, safety and security information, marketing and services messaging
USA - Michigan’s much-anticipated Electric Forest Festival returned for 2022 with an expertly curated line up of EDM stars, jam bands, dubstep heroes and multiple other genres. On the Sherwood Court stage, a massive 7056x2864 canvas of LED screens made up of 180m2 of Roe MC7 and 150m2 of YesTech MG7 featured visuals created by Observatory and powered by Hippotizer Tierra+ MK2 Media Servers. Notable on the Sherwood Court stage were US ‘heaven trap’ DJ duo Slander, bass-heavy Mersiv, and ‘chillwave’ pioneer Toto y Moi. Observatory’s brief was to create the scenic visual content for the Sherwood Court stage’s proscenium arch LED screens, and the upstage LED screen when there wasn’t a guest VJ or content supplied with the performer. The team was commissioned by Electric Forest organisers Insomniac events and Leisure Expert Group, on the back of a successful
Switzerland - During the first two weeks of July, legions of music lovers again descended on the shores of Lake Geneva for the Montreux Jazz Festival, which returned this summer. Meyer Sound also returned to Montreux at full force for its 36th year as a strategic partner and official sound provider, supporting the festival with nearly 300 loudspeakers deployed across 12 venues, indoors and out, large and small. Most of the festival’s headliner concerts are presented in the 4,000-seat Auditorium Stravinski, and this year the venue also had the distinction of hosting the first indoor concerts to be reinforced by Meyer Sound’s new system, the Panther large-format linear line array loudspeaker. “It was pure joy to mix on Panther,” said festival sound coordinator Martin Reich of audioconsulting ag, who also served as FOH engineer for Westerman and Gregory Port
Poland - In the city centres and main squares of many Polish towns and cities, visitors will come upon a multi-purpose building known locally as a ‘culture house’. Like many of these structures, which date back to the 1960s, Arts and Culture Centre Oskard in Konin was beginning to show its age. A renaissance has now taken place in this centre thanks to a renovation project run by the Arts and Culture Centre Oskard's Arts Council and Committee. A key part of this rejuvenation was the installation of two all-new lighting rigs, one for each of the centre’s stages. The council did careful research, visiting trades shows and consulting with local installation specialist, LTT, which distributes Chauvet Professional products in Poland. In the end, Chauvet Professional fixtures were used for the new rig. To provide the foundation for a multitude of powerful looks
UK - AED Audio supported a student music showcase, What’s Going On at The BRIT School in Croydon, South London which is funded by the British Record Industry Trust. Its alumni include artists such as Adele, Jessie J and Amy Winehouse. What’s Going On was a showcase of protest music in a variety of eclectic styles, all performed and written by current year 12 music students. The concert took place in the School’s Obie Theatre, which AED Audio provided with a range of equipment to help bring the student’s creations to life. This included two line arrays consisting of eight FLEX6 speakers and one SOLID15 low cabinet/subwoofer, as well as a ground stack of SOLID28 and SOLID15 subs with a FLEX6 in point source to provide infill to each side. The AED Audio system integrated seamlessly with the Obie Theatre’s existing Dante network, meaning it could o
USA - Tallowood Baptist Church, in the Memorial City neighbourhood of West Houston, replaced an aging mixing console at front-of-house with a Solid State Logic Live L350 in recent months. The installation was part of ongoing upgrades at the church that also includes construction of a new video and audio control room, new audio and video equipment and wider implementation of a network infrastructure. When the choir and the musicians returned to the church after the initial lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, they all wore masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and, not surprisingly, it sounded like it. “It was really hard to get intelligibility and clarity,” Tallowood’s director of technology, Miguel Ortiz, says. Then the church replaced the old desk with a new SSL Live L350. “The choir was still wearing masks when we switched the console - and it sounded as if
USA - DJ Deorro played two shows at the Hollywood Palladium in early July and electrified the sold-out crowds using a lighting rig that included Elation’s multi-functional Smarty Hybrid CMY colour mixing moving head as the main moving effect light. The atmosphere at the 4,000-capacity venue both nights was raging, reflecting the EDM community’s excitement to be back live, as well as the hype around the artist’s new album Orro which was released just days before. “The Smartys were an excellent choice because they can move as fast as a typical beam fixture, but also provide all the core attributes a spot fixture has to offer,” said Lorcan Clarke of the full-featured 11,000-lumen moving heads. Clarke served as lighting director, programmer and operator on the shows, coordinating 12 Smarty's on the downstage floor plus another 12 on the downstage overhead truss
USA - Veteran audio engineers Ross Landis and Andrew Crow had the opportunity to demo an Allen & Heath dLive system earlier this year. “You can do basically anything, and set it up how you want,” recalled Landis. When it came time to tour with Grammy-nominated rock group Nothing More, the pair opted to each bring along a dLive S5000 surface - one at front of house, and one for monitors. Both Landis and Crow appreciated how many user-defined SoftKeys were available to them on the large format 28-fader dLive surface. “I was able to use those for mute groups, stopping and starting my recordings, FX controls, and even selecting certain channels that aren’t always visible on my fader banks” noted Landis. “To be able to mix how I want to mix without having to navigate through layers - that was huge.” Their system incorporated a DM64 MixRack, which features
UK - Japanese-born singer-songwriter, model, and actress Rina Sawayama, released her debut album during lockdown on the Dirty Hit Label to favourable reviews, from ‘strongest album of the year’ (Elton John) to ‘something truly beautiful’ (NPR). In support of the album, Patchwork London was selected by Rina’s management / record label to record live video shoots during the lockdown period, providing monitoring and multi-track recording, which led to Patchwork being asked to support the UK tour, followed by her biggest show to date at Roundhouse and ultimately the NME Awards 2022 show. With lots of energetic choreography and dancing, on her first large scale tour, a premium wireless microphone system was a necessity. Patchwork London’s touring director and Rina’s production manager / FOH engineer, Calum Mordue selected the Shure Axient Digital Wireless Sys
Singapore – This summer, the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) returned to the Southeast Asian city island for the first time in two years. Titled The Anatomy of Performance - Ritual, the event featured over 70 performances staged at seven sites and venues, all designed by creative designers in various performance art disciplines. Opening the festival with a performance in a defunct power station, SIFA presented the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound provided by J5 Productions. The Singapore Chinese Orchestra, together with the Tuyang Initiative, a Sarawak-based creative agency that focuses on the cultural heritage of indigenous Borneans, opened the festival with their performance of Mepaan. In the language of the Kayan peoples of Borneo, mepaan means ‘always’ and the performance was a sonic and visual voyage through the
Finland - From Clash of Clans to the family favourite Hay Day and more recent releases such as Boom Beach and Brawl Stars, Supercell has become one of the most successful and profitable mobile gaming companies in the world. Now, Supercell has finally moved into their first custom-built offices in Helsinki – an impressive building named Wood City that has been designed from the ground up to represent the company culture and to encourage wellbeing and productivity Nearly 500 Genelec loudspeakers have been integrated across the building, including some 300 Smart IP networked models. Markus Haikonen is Head of AV and Broadcast at Supercell. “When we started to build the company’s new home, we needed to reimagine the spaces where we work,” he says. “We needed rock-solid AV project management, which is what Akukon did for us. We also ne
USA - Australian singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Tash Sultana is back out on tour for the first time in three years supporting the sophomore 2021 release, Terra Firma. Following an initial 15-date jaunt across Europe and the UK in March and April, Sultana has just now completed a 32-show North American trek, which kicked off on in June in Las Vegas and wrapped up on 24 July in southern California. For the run, Nashville-based Worley Sound supplied the tour with its FOH and monitor control packages, both of which were built on DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles. The current 2022 world tour finds Sultana morphing from a solo act to a full band setup for the first time. “I started touring with Tash in 2017 and carried a DiGiCo SD11i system that I loved on many dates around the world for the solo years,” says Perth-based FOH engineer Sam Pe
South Africa - Lighting designer Ryan Lombard decided that South Africa’s newest DSTV games show The Saturday Showdown was prime time for him to make the switch to an all grandMA3 – hardware and software – solution to run lighting and video graphical content! The show was recorded at Urban Brew Studio 10 in Johannesburg, and produced by Red Pepper Productions for broadcaster Mzansi Magic, and designed as an action-packed sport-themed entertainment game show to keep fans enthralled on Saturday nights while the Local and Premier Leagues take their break. Ryan specified a grandMA3 light as the main console for graphics and lighting, coupled with grandMA3 onPC running on a dedicated computer on the network accessed via a grandMA3 onPC command wing which was used to trigger all the reactive LX and AV cues as different sections of the games were played. T
France - Opened in spring 2021, the Scène de Bayssan sits on a site near Béziers in south-west France which has a rich history going back 5,000 years over successive Greek, Roman and Gallic societies. More recently, the area hosted a circus, a fact that’s reflected in the Scène’s architecture. The new theatre complex features three spaces; the open-air Claude Nougaro amphitheatre which can accommodate 965 people seated or 1462 standing, the 432-seated / 1350 standing Michel Galabru theatre, and a small structure that houses reception facilities. Offering a varied programme of perfoming arts, art exhibits and cultural events, Scène de Bayssan required an ultimately versatile sound system that could handily address the varied programme. The team chose L-Acoustics K, A and X Series, supplied by L-Acoustics partner, Du Show, to deliver both consistent audience coverage
UK - The Drum theatre is a flexible performance studio venue, forming a successful part of the Theatre Royal Plymouth (TRP) complex. A bijou 159-capacity space, it hosts a mix of house productions and also receives shows from established smaller scale touring theatre companies. The venue has recently undergone a full refurbishment including a premium sound system from EM Acoustics based on their flagship Reference Series loudspeakers. TRP head of sound, Dan Mitcham explains that as part of the renovation process, he and his team were tasked with looking into how to improve the existing sound system. “We had a four-box set up of main L/R and surround L/R, but it didn’t cover the whole auditorium, and was also starting to show its age. We decided it was better to start again from scratch and put in a system worthy of the space.” Mitcham continues, “We’ve always
UK - When Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts decided to bring a bold new actor-musician interpretation to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s musical adaption of the Stephen King classic Carrie, it was Mountview’s former head of lighting training, Louisa Smurthwaite, who worked with the students to create the visceral, yet retro lighting design. Keen to introduce fixtures that bought an era-reflecting feel to the classic story, yet still introduce the students to the latest lighting technology, Smurthwaite specified the VL5LED Wash luminaires by Vari-Lite, the originator of the modern moving head and a Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) entertainment lighting brand. With a lighting design brief from show director Rich Fitch that specified ‘Stranger Things meets ‘80s horror gameshow,’ the scenic design, created by Sophia Pardon, was a torn-up school, ravaged by the
Singapore - The School of Design and Media, part of ITE College Central in Singapore, recently placed an order for Ayrton's Ghibli S fixtures as part of the lighting inventory for the Higher NITEC in Performance Production programme. The students use these fixtures on a regular basis as part of the course where they learn to rig and set up lighting, as well as practise programming on the console, all within the school's Blackbox training facility. Mr A. Kumarran, lecturer in Performance Production, chose the Ghibli S fixtures to boost and expand the school's lighting offering and support the teaching curriculum. “Students are introduced to different types of lighting fixtures to expand their knowledge of industry practices,” he explains. “We wanted to include a hardy fixture that was able to provide a good number of gobos and effects. Such attributes are ideal for stud
UK - The Fish Society has been running for 25 years and is one of the UK’s leading online fishmongers. Having witnessed the online spike of a home cooking being filmed for YouTube and TikTok during the pandemic, the company decided to branch out and build a studio kitchen within their Guildford-based offices to deliver their own ‘how-to’ video content. “The team wanted a premium system with cameras used for recording and streaming live content and after going through various options, we mapped out a solution that was right for them,” recalls Flipside AV managing director, James Cooper. “When they mentioned Master Chef as their inspiration, I had a felling there would be a technical challenge that can often happen in a separated studio kitchen, but I think we mapped it out just right with the camera and mic positioning to get some good footage – it’s a
Europe - As the summer touring season moves into top gear, artists from Lorde and Bon Iver, to Tindersticks, H.E.R. and Lewis Capaldi are turning to DPA Microphones to deliver clear, reliable audio. Phillip J. Harvey, FOH mixing engineer for pop artist Lorde, is currently travelling through Europe in support of the artist’s Solar Power Tour. A longtime fan of DPA, Harvey started Lorde on a d:facto 4018VL Vocal Microphone in 2017. Since then, he has put DPA mics on nearly the entire drum kit, with 4099 CORE Extreme SPL on snare bottom, hi-hats, toms and under heads, and a 2011 Twin Diaphragm Cardioid on snare top. “The flat response of the d:facto is a huge asset and the bleed is very palatable - unlike any other vocal mic I’ve experienced,” he says. “That realistic response provides the foundation for colouring sounds in the mix any way I want, and it’s ama
