LONDON – With 80 candles on your cake, you're entitled to a lot of wishes. How about having Sharon Stone and Kevin Spacey host a charity concert at Royal Albert Hall featuring musical guests Bryan Ferry, Shirley Bassey, Katherine Jenkins, the Scorpions, Paul Anka, The London Symphony Orchestra, Maestro Valery, Gergiev Bolshoi and Mariinsky Soloists, the Igor Krutoi Turetsky Choir, Andrey Gavrilov, among others?
For former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, those wishes came true, and Britannia Row Productions, which provided audio support, brought four Midas consoles to the party – including an XL8, an PRO6 and a Heritage 3000 at FOH and a second XL8 providing onstage monitor duties. Broadcast feeds were also provided as the event was being recorded for Russian TV.
Celebrating Gorbachev's life from childhood through to high office, the reforms of Perestroika, his international peace efforts and the charitable work of the Gorbachev Foundation, the event took advantage of Midas' networking abilities keep everything running smoothly, with Britannia Row also handling audio for the numerous guest speakers and VT playback.
Richard Sharratt took care of the orchestra from the XL8 while Tom Howat set up show scenes for all the bands on the PRO6 and looked after their FOH engineers. The H3000 was supplied for the exclusive use of the Scorpions.
Sharratt and Howat created an AES50 network by linking the FOH and monitor XL8s, and connecting the XL8 and PRO6 at FOH with Cat5 cables. This allowed audio from any input to be patched through to any console, and anywhere else in the network.
A Midas DL451 modular I/O box was located next to the Heritage 3000, and outputs from the analog console were patched into this for networking into the PA. There were two further DL451s at FOH for local connections to the XL8 and PRO6 respectively, while a fourth DL451 on stage provided orchestra stems to the broadcast trucks.
"I could pipe sound from any desk to any desk down the network, and we quite simply couldn't have done this particular show without it, as it was extremely busy, with lots of last minute requests from production and only one day of rehearsals," said Howat. "The Midas consoles worked brilliantly, and there were none of the occasional problems that one can come across with networking; it really came into its own and the network worked a treat."
Howat noted that visiting engineers were pleased to find a PRO6 was available to mix their bands on. "Bryan Ferry's engineer, Nick Warren, had just discovered the PRO6 and was extremely pleased to see it there," he said. "Paul Anka's engineer from the U.S. was also delighted to see it, and I gave him a quick lesson on rehearsal day and he picked it up very quickly. A couple of the Russian engineers who weren't used to driving it also learned fast.
"As an engineer, it's great to show someone how quick it is to get to know," Howat continued. "Because I handled all the scene processing they didn't even have to think about that, they let me get on with the tech side of it and they got on with mixing their numbers."
The orchestra provided backing for the majority of artists, and Sharratt used the XL8's POP(ulation) Groups to break the orchestra inputs down into different sections: high strings, low strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, and so on. He then assigned VCAs to various sections of the orchestra.
"We were providing stems for monitors and broadcast, so that left us with three stereo groups for the orchestra – high strings, low strings and everything else, plus two mono vocal groups, one for presenter handhelds and one for lectern mics," Sharratt said.
All proceeds from the event went to the Gorbachev Foundation and Macmillan Cancer Support.
For more information, please visit www.midasconsoles.com.
