UK - Back in the late 1530s, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries that had been familiar fixtures on the English landscape prior to the Reformation. Most of the stately buildings were destroyed, their material scavenged for other purposes. But one survived thanks to the intervention of Augustine Steward, Mayor of Norwich, who convinced the king to deed the impressive friary in his city to the people, so it could be used for fairs, feasts and other public functions. Today, almost 500 years later, the monastery complex (the oldest surviving one in the UK), is still thriving as The Halls, a community cultural centre with architectural features that provide a dramatic backdrop for a variety of events. Among these performances was a recent high school choral concert sponsored by Norfolk Music Hub that was animated by an evocative lighting design featuring Chauvet Professional Ov
UK - Swedish rapper Yung Lean has recently completed his biggest UK headline show to date - Wings of Desire at London’s O2 Academy in Brixton, accompanied by an Allen & Heath dLive Wings set-up. The full audio set-up - owned by FOH engineer Gustav Brunn - is used for both FOH and Mon duties and features a dLive C1500 surface fitted with a Waves 3 card at FOH position in conjunction with a CDM32 MixRack, fitted with a Dante card, and an IP6 Controller at stage position. Brunn comments: “I was looking for a fly-in rig that we can take anywhere in the world when A&H released the new dLive series. It’s such a competent rig and really suits my needs - I can bring it with me anywhere on the planet.” On stage, a DJ performs alongside the artists using Ableton Live with the outputs sent to the CDM32 via Dante. The IP6 is used to allow the producti
Canada - SC Media Canada and Ivan’s Audio-Visual recently outfitted Moncton, New Brunswick’s new Avenir Centre arena with a complete Harman Professional Solutions audio system. Avenir Centre is an 8,800-seat multi-use arena that is home to the Moncton Wildcats hockey team and Moncton Magic and basketball team. Although it primarily serves as a sports arena, Avenir Centre also hosts performances by renowned acts like Keith Urban and Jerry Seinfeld in addition to speaking events, trade shows and more. To provide exceptional sound quality for a wide range of entertainment and events, the arena needed a powerful audio system that could deliver even and highly-controlled sound coverage. To meet these objectives, SC Media Canada and Ivan’s Audio-Visual designed and deployed an end-to-end Harman system featuring JBL VRX line arrays, Crown DriveCore amplifiers, BSS BLU
Brazil - Ivete Maria Dias de Sangalo Cady is one of the best-selling Brazilian female singers, with 15m copies sold from her six albums released with Banda Eva and seven more as part of her solo career. For her recent DVD production Ivete Sangalo Live Experience in the Allianz Park in São Paulo, lighting designers Paulinho Lebrão and Guillermo Herrero used two grandMA2 full-size consoles, one grandMA2 light and four MA NPUs (Network Processing Units) to control a set with more than 800 fixtures. Lebrão explains: “We have been using grandMA2 consoles since 2011, and the experience, knowledge and confidence we have in the system leaves us no doubt in the choice. When art director Gringo Cardia presented this project, the mission for us was create lighting that could show the big size, plus all the details of the scenography. Another request was to transform t
USA - In its first major renovation since 1987, the PepsiCo Theatre at Purchase College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY), now has a precision L-Acoustics ARCS WiFo loudspeaker system integrated by Southington, Connecticut-based integrator North American Theatrix. Designed by set designer Ming Cho Lee, the mid-sized PepsiCo Theatre has a large stage allowing for exceptional adaptability. It also makes an ideal venue for film screenings, with comfortable seating, a rear screen projection bay, and fully digital projection capabilities. A $730,000 grant from locally-based beverage giant PepsiCo in 2016, combined with additional donations, allowed for the complete renovation of the theatre - from the seats and the carpeting to the sound, projection, and lighting systems to critical backstage infrastructure. The new PA setup for the Performing Arts Centre of
Europe - American blues rockers Welshly Arms have recently completed their European tour with an Allen & Heath dLive system handling FOH duties. The latest tour supports their newest album release No Place is Home. The band’s set-up consists of a dLive C3500 at FOH with a CDM32 fitted with a Dante card, placed centre stage. dLive’s Tie Lines patching option is utilised to provide a digital split over Dante to an additional console on monitors. Additionally, a DX168 expander is positioned stage-right for extra analogue I/O. FOH engineer David Sievers comments: “When it comes to deciding on which desk and gear to use on tour, there are so many options now, but dLive really stood out against the rest. I chose dLive due to its flexibility, its great sound and the fact I can add a Waves card to the surface and a Dante card to the MixRack.” Sievers a
USA - The Department of Theatre at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo has added 12 Claypaky Axcor Spot 300 moving LED fixtures to its inventory. The lights serve three theatres in the department’s complex as well as an additional performing space elsewhere on campus. The spots are making their debut during the 2018-19 theatre season. The Axcor Spot 300s replace ageing moving lights, which are at the end of their lifecycle. “I had been looking for LED-based fixtures capable of projecting patterns and with a varied range of colours,” says Matthew Knewtson, professor of theatre and lighting design. “I found the Axcor Spots in doing online research, and colleagues recommended the Claypaky fixtures as a viable option.” The Axcor Spot 300s were purchased from BMI Supply in Queensbury, New York. ACT Lighting, Inc. is the exclusive distributor of Claypaky light
A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) has provided KCS Group with a Green Hippo Hippotizer V4 Karst+ Media Server to make Honda UK’s live event content stand out from the crowd. KCS, an experiential marketing and events company, has worked with Honda exclusively for 15 years - providing them and their dealerships with the support to make every event a success. KCS were asked to procure a media server and all necessary hardware to give Honda the ability to display varying content across different areas of their show stands, whilst giving them the option to link the screens together as well, to broadcast live content simultaneously across them all. Gareth Coleman, project manager for KCS, visited PLASA earlier this year to research his options. He met Stuart Burdett, sales manager for AC-ET's specialist video sales division. Coleman says: “After speaking wit
UK - Working with production company Attention Seekers, LED Creative provided a selection of products from their Sigma LED range to help build the clean, modern look created for the semi-final of the McLaren Shadow Project. Staged at the prestigious McLaren Technology Centre and streamed live via the project’s YouTube Channel, the event is a highly contested battle for a place on the McLaren E-Sports Team. Having been whittled down from over half a million applicants, the final eight ‘virtual drivers’ were tested over a series of racing challenges, competing at legendary tracks in iconic McLaren machinery. The custom-built Shadow Project studio features eight ‘racing sleds’ configured specifically for the event. Sited on raised podiums edged with crisp LED Highlights, the ‘sleds’ house the individual drivers in cockpits fronted with a colour coded ‘V’
France - La Seine Musicale is a venue in Paris that resides on a small island in the middle of the Seine. From its inception, there was a desire to have studio recording and rehearsing space facilities integrated as a permanent part of the building that hosts concerts, musicals, ballets, comedy and corporate events. It quickly became clear that the best way to ensure easy connectivity from every potential recording space to the control room would be to install a building-wide network of Ethernet cables and connection ports. It was simply the ideal way to route high counts of audio channels between locations. An IP Audio solution was a must - and following careful considerations, the team decided to go for Audinate’s Dante protocol. Arnaud Kalmes, the head engineer at the Riffx Studios in the La Seine Musicale building comments: “The implementation of a Dante Networ
Europe - FOH engineer Matt West (Motorhead, Snoop Dogg, The Cure, Eminem) has specified Solid State Logic L500 live mixing desk for the latest tour of French indie pop band Phoenix. The band's latest Album, Ti Amo, came out last year and has been the focus of their most recent world tour. While West has extensive experience on digital consoles, he says he has mostly used them for ergonomic reasons, rather than sound. "I'm an analogue engineer and I come out of that world,” admits West. “Perhaps it's semantics, but there's a warmth that you don't normally get with zeros and ones - at least that’s what I thought that until I came across the SSL. "On previous tours I had an outboard rack that I'd carry everywhere with me, with some nice compressors like DBX160s, Distressors, 901s. All that lovely sort of stuff. During
UK - SSE Audio Group’s JBL VTX system was specified by Enrique Iglesias’ FOH engineer Brad Divens for the Spanish singer’s UK autumn arena tour. Divens, already a seasoned JBL VTX user, fielded JBL’s flagship line array system for five arena shows in the UK and Ireland. All the shows were a complete success, due to careful preparation by SSE Audio Group, led by hire project manager Dan Bennett and system engineer Nick Lythgoe, with support from Stuart Strachan, application engineer at Harman UK distributor Sound Technology and Ed Jackson, senior application engineer at Harman EMEA. The tour is a Sound Image account in the USA, and thanks to the collaboration between Sound Image and SSE through the formation of United Audio Companies in 2015, both companies are able to service their clients on both sides of the Atlantic with each other’s support. The sys
USA - In February 2021, NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet. The spacecraft will be able to capture imagery and sound as the Mars 2020 vehicle descends through the Martian atmosphere and lands on the surface of Mars. To capture sounds from the Red Planet for the first time ever, the Mars 2020 Rover will be outfitted with a selection of equipment from DPA Microphones. The Mars 2020 spacecraft is currently being assembled at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and the DPA products will be installed onto the vehicle in early 2019. DPA’s d:dicate 4006 Omnidirectional Microphone will capture the audio while the MMA-A Digital Audio Interface will be used to record and send audio to a computer through its USB connection. Both mics will be paired with MMP-G Modular Active Cables, which act as ultra-transparent preamplifiers.
USA - Tenth Avenue North released their gold certified Over and Underneath debut album in 2008, but the Dove Award-winning Christian band’s musical virtuosity stretches back much further in time. This is evident in their current Decade The Halls tour, which features a decade-by-decade cornucopia of Christmas music covering more than a half century. Supporting this musical mix with richly coloured visuals that evoke images of different Christmases from times past is a Mike Marcario lighting design that features Chauvet Professional Rogue and Nexus fixtures, supplied by Bandit Lites. Marcario’s transformative lighting seems to move through time with the music, changing colours and the tempo of its movement to reflect the passage of holiday seasons through the years. “This show is definitely fun to do from a lighting standpoint,” says Marcario. “
Japan - Ayrton reports that Tokyo’s Studio Tanta chose the French manufacturer’s lighting products for its rehearsal studios. The successful installation includes 10 Ayrton NandoBeam S3 units, six WildBeam R fixtures and four Arcaline 2 100 battens which were permanently installed in Rehearsal Studio-C. Studio Tanta is an impressive seven-storey building which took five years to build from planning to completion. It has two recording studios, a rehearsal studio, two artists’ rooms, and a restaurant. Hibino Lighting, Ayrton’s exclusive distributor for Japan, was responsible for the supply and installation of the Ayrton fixtures and a lighting console. Takahisa Hasegawa, the owner and CEO of Studio Tanta, comments: “It has always been my long-term goal to build a large-scale studio in Tokyo so, before designing Tanta, we went on a study trip to visit famous s
The Netherlands - Navarone, one of the best, most energetic and appreciated rock bands in the Netherlands returned to their home base in Nijmegen, launching their fourth studio album with help from the new CLF Orion hybrid. Lighting designer Roy Baarslag was looking for an extensive floor setup to emphasise all the accents in Navarone’s dynamic musical style. “The band wants me to create a lively and energetic show with a lot of variety. I needed fixtures that offer a huge amount of effect versatility, so that’s why the CLF Orion definitely caught my attention.” A powerful light source and efficient optics enable the Orion to produce heavy mid-air effects. “Their output really surprised me, sometimes I even had to reduce it to achieve a balance with the house rig.” In addition, the extensive feature package of the Orion was a useful tool for Baarslag. “I
UK - Diwali is the Hindu, Sikh, and Jain festival of lights, which symbolises victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. The 2018 Diwali was celebrated with a huge event in the heart of London on 7 November with music, dance, workshops, foods, crafts, and, of course, plenty of lights from SGM Light. “The brief was to create something that was both visual and memorable. We mainly chose SGM fixtures because of the outdoor usage, and Ethix has a very long relationship with SGM and their products, and an excellent record of support. The high IP classification in SGM’s products is very important to me as the majority of our projects are outdoors. Ensuring that a fixture is up to the job is paramount,” explained Paul Jones from production company Ethix Management. For the project, Ethix used G-Spots, G-Spot Turbos, P-5s, and Q-7s.
South Korea - Star Events’ VerTech Ultra system provided for a production at Riot Games’ League of Legends World Championships final in South Korea. The opening ceremony at Incheon Munhak Stadium, Seoul, used augmented reality (AR) to fit virtual/in-game band K/DA onstage, and across over 2,000sq.m of screens, for the first musical performance, alongside Madison Beer, Miyeon and Soyeon of (G)I-DLE, and Jaira Burns later in the show. The 85-minute multi-player League of Legends final was broadcast across more than 30 platforms and TV channels and saw China’s Invictus Gaming beat Europe’s team Fanatic 3-0 to take the trophy and $834,375 in prize money. Total production ‘frontage’ for the live event stage was 165m wide and 27m high, Star T-towers built on top of the Ultra structure lifting audio hangs fully clear of the screens with a hook height 32m ab
UK - Choose Love, a charitable movement that provides humanitarian aid to refugees, opened a pop-up store in London to operate in the four-week run up to Christmas. Pioneer Pro Audio was selected to donate a sound system. The store works on the principle that visitors ‘shop their hearts out’ but leave with nothing, having bought essentials like solar lamps, blankets, bags and women’s products to enable similar items to be given to refugees. As a way of attracting attention and driving further footfall to the store, it hosts a variety of DJ sets from luminaries such as Jarvis Cocker and even has a Banksy artwork on display. Pioneer Pro Audio was happy to supply two XPRS 10 tops complemented by two XPRS 115s subs, to provide crisp, punchy audio for the store’s generous customers. Mark Grotefeld, general marketing manager at Pioneer Pro Audio, comment
UK - Some Voices, a 500 strong London choir hosted three consecutive seasonal Speakeasy nights of choral performances at Troxy last week. The 1925 dress and theming were accentuated perfectly by Troxy’s art decor architecture, but when it came to production the events were firmly rooted in the present day. Troxy’s head of sound Ben Ellis was on hand, from Monday’s 7am load-in to Wednesday’s show close to assist the choir’s technical production – in particular the incoming sound and lighting engineers. “In terms of the PA system we used our in-house front-of-house, the new JBL VTX A12 speaker system installed this Autumn by SSE. Their engineer brought in his own Alan and Heath dLive console that he had built his show on and was familiar with, which we ran FOH and monitors from. “A show with this many singers generates a fair amount of
Slovenia - Ales Pirman runs a successful lighting rental company, Intralite, and in 2018 decided to promote his own event - Castle - Kolpa Music Festival, staged over four days at a beautiful site near the Kolpa River, close to the Croatian border. Around 12,000 people enjoyed an international line-up of over 25 artists including Swedish / Norwegian rap metal band Clawfinger, darlings of the avant-garde Laibach, singer songwriter Magnifico, Serbian alt rockers S.A.R.S., Bosnian pop rockers Plavi Orkestar, Slovenian rock band Big Foot Mama and many others. To ensure that they and all the other artists enjoyed the best possible lightshow and production values, over 100 Robe moving lights graced the main stage. This included Intralite’s newest Robe purchase, 20 x MegaPointes, which joined the inventory earlier this year. Ales had dreamed about running his o
UK - The Young Vic recently hosted a different take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The tale received a shake-up as soulful melodies and R&B beats weaved through an enchanting musical adaptation with sound reinforcement courtesy of KV2 Audio products. It was the latest in a long line of successful KV2 theatre productions featuring sound design by Richard Brooker – who once again chose to use KV2’s EX products to transfer every detail of the performance and energetic musical arrangements from the stage to the audience. Twelfth Night follows in the footsteps of Dream Girls, Annie, Sister Act and Funny Girl in successfully deploying KV2’s range of True Point Source loudspeakers and Richard has been instrumental in the rapid rise in profile of KV2 in UK theatres – a trend that has now been emulated on Broadway and in
UK - Given the time of year, chances are, if you told your friends you saw two 8m slugs flying above the skies of Chelsea, they'd think you'd had a few too many drinks at the office Christmas party. But this is exactly what happened earlier this month as Unusual Rigging was brought on board by Tate Britain to help install their seasonal decorations. Sam Carter, Unusual's rigging project manager, says: "Every year, Tate Britain commissions an independent artist to come up with a scheme for its Winter decorations. This year it was the turn of artist Monster Chetwynd, whose gastropod inspired artwork also includes swathes of blue and white LED slug trails across the facade of the building." The Turner Prize nominated artist took inspiration from Sir David Attenborough's 2005 nature series Life in the Undergrowth. The piece also reflects "her interest in alternative ener
Australia - For a company specialising in events, a festival that takes over an entire city can be both the best of times and the worst of times. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo winter festival is all of that for the Hobart-based Alive Technologies Group, but it’s a challenge the team delights in rising to. Dark Mofo, created and run by MONA - Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art - is a fortnight of festivities which celebrates the dark through large-scale public art, food, film, music, light and noise, all held at venues which may be created or re-designed just for the occasion. A huge amount of that venue staging, lighting and audio is taken care of by ATG and the company’s lighting project manager Nathaniel Collins was at the heart of much of the work. “We do a lot with MONA so as a result of that connection, they brought us on, as the largest local supplier. W
