Sound is huge, but staging and lighting have gotten even bigger. Sharpen your elbows.
One of the collateral outcomes of how live music has become the industry’s biggest revenue generator since the turn of the century is a kind of arms race around staging.
U2’s 2009-2011 360° tour was a 160-truck affair that cost an estimated $750,000 in daily production costs, and the four-legged “claw” stages (there were three) each cost between $23 to $31 million. Roger Waters’ 2010-2013 tour, The Wall: Live, another ambitious venture, cost an estimated $60 million to stage (although that’s still a pittance compared to the billions to be spent on a barrier running along the U.S./Mexico border if Donald Trump and his supporters get their wish.)
There are other touring stage designs that have crossed the eight-digit threshold, and as the upper end of the business relies increasingly on spectacle to sell tickets, there will be more. The question becomes, then, is it getting harder to fit the right sound systems into these colossal displays?
“It all depends on how the artist prioritizes sound quality,” comments Everett Lybolt, general manager at Sound Image’s Nashville office.
Live Shows — Bigger and Bolder
He pauses for a moment, as if taken slightly aback by acknowledging out loud that any music artist would place sonic quality anywhere else but at the very top of their performance agenda. But that is the reality of live shows today, where the visuals — video walls, moving lights, pyro — might be exactly what induces consumers to part with the roughly $100 an arena or stadium show ticket costs on average now, or five to 10 times that for premium seats and experiences.
Lybolt has been in the business long enough to remember a time when the live show was a subsidized marketing tool used to sell albums, which until less than 20 years ago were the music business’ profit makers. But that’s not the case for artists in their early 20s now, for whom the idea that sound quality as the main criterion of a show’s value might be either quaint or just not a “thing.” That is not an easy concept for any touring-sound veteran to process.
Fortunately, the tools are there now to let sound compete with everything else in the production designer’s imagination. Electronic aiming and the ability to quickly assess each performance space for acoustical anomalies means that loudspeakers are more flexible, allowing system designers to place them in what might otherwise have been awkward positions and still get the sound to move the way it’s supposed to. “We’ve got the ability now to control wave propagation like never before,” Lybolt says. “That lets the sound system compete with the lights and the video screens and the choreography.”
The Art of The Deal
Ken Porter, president of Spectrum Sound, says getting sound systems into increasingly elaborate staging designs has become a negotiating process. Technology solutions will let sound designers dodge some of the bullets created by elaborate and technically intricate stage designs, but the rest need to be tackled by give and take between stakeholders.
“It’s a chess game — the video wall needs to go there, but it could have sightlines impeded by a flown sound-system cluster, so we could move that over there, but it’ll be blocked by the additional lighting truss, and so on,” Porter says. “That brings up issues like cable management, and how the design gets adapted for 180- and 270-degree shows.” Or even 360-degree shows — immersive-audio system designs incorporating products such as L-Acoustics’ L-ISA and the d&b Soundscape platform, which the industry is moving slowly towards, will further complicate these negotiations.
In a variation on this theme, Americana master Chris Stapleton has been touring for the last two years with what he and co-designer Michael Cronin have patented as The Great Big Sonic Thing: a massive, six-ton tube-framed dome that also supports some of the production’s lighting elements but is actually a huge quadratic diffusor that lets old-school Stapleton and his bandmates stick with floor wedges and eschew IEMs. The diffusion disperses sound within the dome equally left, right and vertically, creating equal SPL within its scalable parameters, which are 65 feet wide and 30 feet high in its largest configuration.
The Great Big Sonic Thing, which Cronin told me was designed solely around the artist’s desire to perform in a controlled space, takes the notion of integrating sound systems into production and inverts it, making the staging design conform to a sonic imperative — in this case, the wedge monitors. But it’s also part of the larger theme that’s seeing production design taking a greater role in how concerts look and sound.
What will help with this evolving situation is the fact that sound system components are getting progressively smaller and more efficient. Waveguides are also becoming more flexible, allowing line-array hangs to be placed closer to walls, leaving more space for the rest of the production to unravel but without negatively impacting sound coverage.
However, technological advances won’t necessarily affect what might be a looming change in culture. Music concerts are increasingly viewed by the rapidly expanding live-events industry as simply one more item in a toy box of unique experiences, from live podcasts to live-staged The New Yorker salons, where “multimedia” is the byword. Dan Heims, Garth Brooks’ longtime tour-sound guru, pointed out that even music-centric live events like awards shows have made the audio subordinate to the larger televised spectacle. “[Music on] television has always been challenging,” he told me, “but never more so than now.”
So it will fall to the tour-sound professionals to continue to lobby for sonic quality. Just know that the trick will be to integrate that into increasingly spectacular stages where sound will have to compete with an array of other audience-engaging media. Hey, if it was easy, everyone could do it, right?
