While the 13th annual Bonnaroo Music Festival included a Friday the 13th, it was nothing but good luck, good music, and good times for the 80,000 music-loving fans that showed up for the Manchester, TN event. With more than 200 acts over four days from June 12 to 15, 2014, including headliners Elton John, Kanye West, Jack White, Lionel Richie, Vampire Weekend and the Avett Brothers, it took several sound companies to make it a memorable festival.
“Everything at Bonnaroo seemed to go smoothly this year,” reports Owen Orzack. “Our approach on Bonnaroo and the other large festivals we do is to treat the visiting engineers and performers like we would like to be treated when visiting a festival. We had Camlock available, snake paths sorted and plenty of real estate to set up their consoles. The stage management at ‘Roo is always top notch, and that certainly makes life easy at a festival.”
Orzack is the director of touring services of Highland Heights, OH-based Eighth Day Sound (near Cleveland), which handled the main stage as well as taking care of the comedy and press tents. Two other pieces of the puzzle were CTS Audio out of Brentwood, TN and Livonia, MI-based Thunder Audio, working from their Nashville office.
Say What?
The headliners all played the main stage (What Stage), and that kept Eighth Day plenty busy. Eighth Day’s Jason Kirschnick says their summer has involved rolling all their festival gear through six major festivals. “We treated it like a tour,” he says. “The Hot 97 Summer Jam [held June 1, MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ] was the first festival we did with that main stage system we also used for Bonnaroo. For that main stage, there were two Avid VENUE consoles for 96 channels at front of house and two Avid Profiles for stage monitors — also offering 96 channels.”
Eighth Day Sound deployed a d&b audiotechnik rig for those big acts, and Orzack says, and as it has in the past, the rig performed well at this year’s event. “The system configuration at What Stage has remained consistent over the last few years; the only real difference for 2014 was deployment of all d&b D80 amps. We had many positive comments from visiting engineers about how great those were.”
“The P.A. system had two main flown clusters of 18 J-8 line array enclosures,” Kirschnick adds. There were two flown sub clusters of eight d&b C7-SUBs and two side clusters of 12-deep flown J-8’s. “Six d&b Q7’s provided front fill, and 30 d&b double-18 B2-SUBs were employed in a ground-stack configuration, along with three delay clusters of three d&b V8’s each. In all, the main system had a total of 60 J-8’s, 16 J-SUBs, six J-7’s and 24 V8 delays and 30 B2’s — all powered using d&b D80 4-channel amplifiers.”
The stage monitoring included 20 d&b M2 wedges on deck; there were four d&b J-8’s and two B2-SUBs per side for sidefills. Eighth Day also supplied a large assortment of mics and wireless gear.
The FOH console roster included a DiGiCo SD10 for Kanye West and Arctic Monkeys, a DiGiCo SD7 for Lionel Richie, a Soundcraft Vi6 for Vampire Weekend a Midas PRO6 for Umphrey’s McGee and analog consoles for both Jack White and Elton John — Midas XL4 and Yamaha PM5000, respectively.
RF: Clean & Clear
Either by design or luck, it seems that no one reported any RF problems.
These days, RF coordination can be tough under the best of circumstances, but with all the stages, several sound companies, dozens of musicians, and various press crews in attendance, wireless can be a problem. While other festivals like this typically have a single third-party RF coordinator, “Bonnaroo hasn’t gone there yet,” Orzack says. At the What Stage, Eighth Day was physically located further away from the other stages and tents and that tended to help keeping RF issues at bay. “Our monitor techs handled the coordination onstage with the various visiting monitor engineers.”
“There were no RF issues,” CTS Audio’s Mike Taylor reports. “Our team deployed eight channels of Shure UHF-R wireless and eight channels of Shure PSM 1000’s, and we always have Shure Axient Scanners in our package to help us with any RF issues. I would say over the whole Bonnaroo site we had over 100 RF devices and we never had one dropout.”
Thunder Audio’s Greg Snyder also reported no wireless challenges.
This and That
CTS traditionally stays busy with Christian-related events, conferences and tours along with sports-related events. Mike Taylor says CTS has been part of Bonnaroo for five years, and they handled That Tent plus eight other tents including the Cinema, Ford and Spiegeltent areas and the Red Bull stage. Acts they took care of include A Tribe Called Red, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and the Black Lillies.
CTS outfitted That Stage with a JBL VTX V25 system, putting nine of the speakers per side and throwing in 15 subs. “We’re deep into the Harman line, and we use it for our tours as well,” Taylor said. “We’ve been with them since their first VerTec in 2004, and they are a great partner.”
On the smaller stages, Taylor says that while most of the acts had their own engineers, the powers that be tended to discourage board swapping, preferring the acts to use the AVID Profiles he had at FOH.
To get acts on and playing quickly on That Stage, Taylor says they did a lot of double-miking and relied on their Shure and Sennheiser mic kits. “It was all pretty seamless,” he says of the transitions. “We buried all the snakes — and we had a lot of them to do whatever we needed to do. We had digital, analog — all kinds of snakes!” he laughs.
CTS had a crew of 13 working the show with two crews totally seven dedicated to the That Tent. “We needed two crews because the shows could start at 11:00 a.m. and run until 4:30 in the morning.”
Involved with Bonnaroo for more than a decade, Dallas-based Crossroads Audio, Inc. was the provider for five of the stages — Which Stage, Sonic Stage, Cafe Where, Tru Music Cafe and Fuse Barn — along with supplying 12 other small P.A. systems at other locales throughout the festival site.
The Which Stage sported a large Meyer Sound MILO rig with700 HP subwoofers and hosted acts ranging from The Flaming Lips, Broken Bells and The Head and The Heart, to Phoenix, Skrillex and Ice Cube. Crew chief Ed Spotto reports that 14 Crossroads Audio crew members were on hand to work the show.
Thunder Audio was part of the ‘Roo solution as well. They outfitted and staffed the This Tent and The Other Tent serving acts including Drive-By Truckers, Bobby Womack, and Lauryn Hill, among others. They had a crew of a dozen also working in two shifts.
“We used eight hangs of Meyer MILO with 12 HP 700 subs per stage,” he says. Thunder provided an Avid VENUE Profile console at FOH and Yamaha PM5D-RHs for monitor mixing.
“Only a couple of acts used their own consoles; the bulk worked with what was provided,” he says. Thunder also buried a lot of snakes to be ready for any situation, including Cat-5 and MADI snakes.
Challenges and Triumphs
“Keeping the gear clean was one of the biggest challenges,” Snyder adds. “These festivals are either muddy or dusty [this one was the latter]. Constant attention to cleaning and maintenance for this week is a must.”
“It was a great experience for Thunder Audio,” Snyder says. “We love doing Bonnaroo. It’s a great challenge and a great festival for our staff. The artists are all wonderful to work with. We look forward to it next year!”
“We were fortunate to have some great engineers mixing on our rig (Brad Madix, Toby Francis, Tim Colvard, Matthew Kettle, Neil Heal, Chris Mitchell, Matt Butcher). That makes the hard work worth it,” Orzack says. “Bonnaroo is truly a special festival; the ‘vibe’ is different than any other festival we do. Every year seems to get better. We are already looking forward to next year!”
