Mass music events are becoming the norm around the world.
We have covered festivals as a business trend and have covered many individual events as production profiles, but this year we are pulling out all the stops and gathering coverage of more than a half-dozen festivals into a single feature. It’s a big job, but somebody’s gotta do it… Enjoy.
Summerfest 2008: A Midwestern Family Affair
Summerfest has been running since 1968 and has grown to be the largest festival in the world. Period. (Ed note: There is some question here. Rock in Rio also claims to be the biggest, so it all depends on how you look at it. Stages? Performers?
Attendance? Revenue? Like Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. To which this editor would add “gear specs,” but that is for another story…)
I worked at Summerfest for many years and my son D.J. (now 28 and a touring sound engineer veteran) spent his youth growing up every summer on the grounds from the age of six. He was tutored by folks like Harry Witz, Ronnie Kimbal (Bad Religion) and Mike Piper (The Allman Brothers). D.J. was a young teen back then. My slightly younger brother, Todd (Clair Bros.), has been working with the festival for longer than I have. My nephew Dave was seven years old when he used to hide under the Old Style Stage. Dave is now 25 and touring the world as a backline tech. Next year it will be my six-year-old grandson’s turn to be brought into this Summerfest fold.
What and Who?
Going back to interview old comrades like Terry Linneman (system tech at the Briggs and Stratton Stage for over 20 years), Greg and Gary Brunclick (Clearwing Productions), and our buddies Steve Vallee and Rick Erickson was a blast and honor. Working productions for Summerfest is like a family reunion every year. So what and who makes this festival unique? Here’s an FOH exclusive overview and interview we hope you will enjoy.
Every year for over the last 40 years, the city of Milwaukee has played host to what has been called the largest festival of its kind in the world — Summerfest. It goes for 11 days starting the last week of June and ending just after the Fourth of July. It takes place on 75 acres of lakefront adjacent to downtown Milwaukee.
The festival site, the Henry W. Maier Festival Park, stretches about a mile and a quarter, starting on the south end with the 23,000-capacity Marcus Amphitheater and runs north with 12 other permanent mini-amphitheater structures — all with varied capacities of 6,000-plus each, respectively.
Handling production for an outdoor shed the size of the Marcus Amphitheater is a fulltime gig alone — add to the mix 12 more stages that require backline, hospitality and the usual rider requirements for international touring acts and you get the idea.
Production Manager Steve Vallee takes it all in stride and virtually alone. With the help of his assistant Amanda Grumbein, Vallee is unseasonably calm commanding Summerfest. For the last 21 years, he has been producing all the shows at all the stages from a small production office stage right off the loading docks at the Marcus. When Vallee started, they had seven stages. Over the years that number has grown to 12 to handle different pockets of demographics. This year, the new Harley Davidson stage is an incredible design feat by the motorcycle giant. It looks as awesome as it sounds.
Some of the biggest bands and artists in the world have played Summerfest during Vallee’s tenure, and a lot of them performed a mile or more from his sightline. With 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. calls and 12 a.m. to 1 a.m. outs, he laughs and says, “I get home some days with just enough time to shower and then come back.”
A Massive Project
So how does he smoothly attack a massive project like Summerfest each year with high degrees of consistency? “Well, I wrote a preparatory computer program that pretty much keeps all my information organized. I can take the information in at one place and then from there I can develop backline reports, stagehand reports, hospitality and information on sound and lighting companies. It’s an Access program, that’s basically how I keep track of it all.”
As far as festival staff? There is a large group of volunteer drivers for Summerfest. They move the entertainers and their staff to and from the hotels, airport and shows, as well as a number of equipment haulers to transport equipment from the various holding areas to the stages. There are also three or more runners at the Marcus all the time. A nine-person production staff review contracts, arrange hotels, coordinate sponsorship equipment and deal with local band issues.
When priorities and staff collide, Vallee seems to hold them both in high regard. So, what’s up with just one assistant? Vallee explained, “ I like to keep things efficient, and Amanda has done a great job for 11 years with me here. The more people you have the more information gets moved around and people get involved in situations that they shouldn’t. With one good assistant, I can keep my finger on what’s going on. I don’t like to micromanage, but I like to know what’s going on all the time.”
So, almost every aspect of Summerfest production is managed from Vallee’s office at the Marcus, which he rarely wanders from. “I don’t have to move around the grounds a lot. I usually get out there once or twice a day to see what’s going on at the different stages. I talk to the stage managers on the phone all the time. I check in at the end of the night and call all the stage managers and ask them how it went that day. Because I have a show going on here at the Marcus every day, I have a lot of issues to deal with here at the Marcus, but all the stage managers at Summerfest are some of the most professional in the industry as far as I’m concerned. If there’s a problem with production or an artist, you can bet I’ll hear about it right away.”
The longest standing stage manager is Summerfest veteran Rick Erickson at the Briggs and Stratton Stage. He has had 31 years of deployment with the festival.
Vallee works with only a couple different vendors for sound, lighting and backline requirements. Clearwing Productions of Milwaukee supplies lighting for the Marcus Amphitheater and Clair/Showco of Chicago supplies sound for those acts not carrying production for the shed. Clearwing Productions also supplies V-DOSC for sound at all the major ground stages except two and augments and supplies lighting on the stages that have house lighting production. Greg Brunclick, Clearwing’s owner, oversees his company’s employment from stage to stage on the grounds. His company started in the late 1970s, and has gone from doing two small stages at the festival to 90 percent of the production. Clair/Showco supplies sound on one grounds stage, the Briggs and Stratton.
Clearwing also supplies all the backline for the entire festival for the acts not carrying. As you can imagine, Chad Sikkink, who runs Clearwings backline, is a pretty popular fellow during the 11-day festival.
Testing the New Rig
This year was the first year Clearwing took delivery of a new NEXO GEO-T rig for the Zippo Rock stage on the north end of the grounds. Brunclick wanted to deploy the new rig through rigorous combat. The GEO T held the front lines for them well.
“We put the Geo-T at the rock stage purposely so we could pound nails with it so to speak. To let it prove itself,” said Brunclick. “The triple 18-inch subs on the ground surprised everyone. The order of the day at that stage is to fire up the system and play a Rage Against the Machine song as revaley in the morning,” Brunclick chimed. “The Zippo stage is the northern most stage on the grounds. The guys from the southern-most stage on the grounds called the North Zippo stage (about a mile away) not to tell them that they could hear the subs, but that they could feel them. That’s a pretty good testimony on how much air they’re moving!”
The GEO-T performed well for the task at hand. Its cardioid approach seemed to make this PA really clear. It brings out all the things that you’re not used to hearing on other PAs. The subs move your gut almost requiring a change of shorts. The degree of access is great, too. We just loved standing under the fly and walking the stage ground with nothing transitional.
Walking through the Festival site, you’ll find a lot of L-ACOUSTICS V-DOSC. Almost all the stages are digital, with Yamaha PM5Ds leading the pack — the oldest console that we ran into was a Ramsa SX1.
Clearwing has grown a lot over the years and has another office in Phoenix run by Brunclick’s brother, Gary. The company has also won a Parnelli Award for Regional Sound Company of the Year.
Local Artists Welcome
Besides major and regional touring artists, a lot of local Wisconsin artists are featured usually during the day slots at the music stages. Even more diversity comes as you pass stages like the Potawatomi Bingo Casino Stage where you can find an old-fashioned Wisconsin bingo game in the afternoon and bands like The Wailers or Marcia Ball at night. Throw into the mix the small children’s stages and smaller PAs, you have a complete manifest of demographic production from Summerfest Inc. and Clearwing.
So, after the 11 days with over 700 headliners — what’s left for Vallee to do? “Well, first we have to load out and that will start about 9 a.m. the next day, and we’ll finish about 5 p.m. for the whole grounds. Then once I’m done with that, I keep track of the payrolls for the stagehands every day and enter them into the computer. I take a look and see where we are at with the budgets. I have to get projections to our accounting department to see if we’ve gone over budget or not. I deal with whatever issues we had this year and start thinking about changes for next year. I try to start getting an idea on where we are at for next year. Then I basically try to get some sleep.”
He starts working on Summerfest early in the year and never really stops. Advancing all the artists takes time. Vallee’s responsibilities are expansive: He takes care of all the hiring and firing of production staff — surveys new site plans and implements them, budgets for new entertainment areas on the grounds and consults in every aspect of what the Guinness Book of World Records calls, “the largest music festival in the world.”
Rock in Rio: Europe’s claim to the biggest festival gets even bigger.
The world’s largest rock festival grew even larger this year. Rock in Rio drew masses of music-loving revelers to Lisbon in early June before moving to a second location in Madrid for a series of shows in late June and early July. Rock in Rio Lisbon featured performances by Lenny Kravitz, Bob Dylan, Bon Jovi, Metallica, Rod Stewart and Linkin Park, while the Madrid dates included the likes of Neil Young, Shakira, The Police and a shaky-in-stilettos Amy Winehouse. Events at each site drew up to 100,000 people with 300,000 attendees confirmed for Madrid.
“Headroom for Days”
Brazil-based Gabisom Audio Equipment, the largest audio company in Latin America, provided sound system services for all artists at both locations. The main (World Stage) system featured a massive JBL VerTec system with four array locations. A total of 120 VT4889s and 60 VT4880A Ultra Long Excursion subwoofers were deployed in the main suspended arrays.
The main system consisted of four arrays across the front in the normal L/R, LL/RR configuration. The unusual part, however, was that each array consisted of three separate hangs: dual VerTec VT4889 full-range hangs separated by a VT4880A subwoofer hang in the middle. The main left and right arrays had two columns of 18 VT4889 line array elements and one column of 18 VT4880A arrayable subwoofers each. Outer LL and RR columns had two columns of 12 VT4889 elements and one column of 12 VT4880 subwoofers.
“The main PA was set up in a nontraditional and unusual manner, which we call ‘side-by-side,’” said Gabisom’s Peter Racy, chief engineer for Rock In Rio. “It was nontraditional for line array systems because of its mammoth size and also unusual because it was intentionally designed to have a greater amount of acoustical output than usual. The system had headroom for days.”
High Expectations
According to Racy, each cluster (group of these three arrays) was fed three separate signals called Band, Vocal and Sub. This helped create sound that was characterized as “effortlessly powerful and clear” in a festival where the sheer size of the venues and audiences cried out for something more than just a standard PA. “By separating what would normally just be a single program feed in this way, we gain loads of headroom from each of these three dedicated sub-systems, allowing the entire signal flow [mix busses, summing amps, system processors, amplifiers and speaker components] to work in a comfortable range, far below the traditional onset of system limiting or distortion, while delivering the huge sound that has come to be expected at Rock in Rio,” he said.
FOH engineers could elect to feed vocal signals/effects only to the inner VT4889 columns while the music mix went to the outer VT4889 columns. This was the program-feed option recommended by the Gabisom sound crew, which was led by Racy with Valter Silva in charge at front-of-house. Using the “Vocal/Band/Sub” triple-program source feed approach, flown subwoofers had a discrete feed and additional VLF (very low-frequency) content was also able to be fed to additional stage-stacked Meyer subwoofer arrays via an auxiliary signal bus from the mixing console.
Six delay towers were set up, each with six Norton LS-8 line array systems, local to Portugal. With the help of these, Gabisom was able to cover the entire 300-meter-deep (985-foot) audience area with plenty left over to play to the music-driven fountains beyond the seating zone.
“This was the first time that I had to set a delay time by sight,” Racy noted. “We supplied a line-level audio signal to the fountain’s control room. I then had to set the audio signal delay based upon the ballistics/responsiveness of the fountain’s water pumps, while listening to the music and watching the effect of the dancing waters. It was actually quite fun!”
Bringing the Crowds
In Madrid, the July 6 show featuring Bob Dylan, Lenny Kravitz, Franz Ferdinand and Chris Cornell, drew one of the largest single-day crowds of the entire festival. “Gabisom did a great job on the VerTec system design, setup and operations for this year’s Rock In Rio, and our team was quite impressed with the results,” noted UK-based Tony Szabo, system engineer for the European leg of Bob Dylan’s tour. “With Peter and Valter in charge at front of house, and JBL’s new V4 DSP presets loaded in the rig, the show certainly sounded good. We really didn’t have to do too much EQ. All in all, it was a really big PA that looked good and sounded good. What more can you ask for?”
Oregon Jamboree: Horne Audio rocks the country at Oregon Jamboree.
The Jamboree is quite likely the largest and most successful music festival in America that operates under the auspices of a community rather than a private promoter. In this case, it’s for the sole benefit of Sweet Home (population around 8,000), a logging and mill town hit hard by the timber harvest cutbacks of the early 1990s. Looking to leverage its location in the scenic Cascade foothills, the town decided to boost tourism by hosting a country music festival.
Applying federal timber settlement dollars as seed money, the festival premiered in 1992 and has grown steadily ever since. Over 500 townspeople volunteer yearly for the event, working as everything from stagehands to drivers for buses that shuttle fans back and forth from the 16 temporary campgrounds also operated by the festival. (Buses are big, bright yellow and otherwise rarely used in August.) After money is set aside for the following year’s event, the remaining proceeds — well into six figures lately — go to community development grants.
Spanning Generations
The sixteenth edition of the festival ran the first weekend in August with total three-day attendance pushing 40,000. Fans spanning the generations — from preteen through geriatric — streamed into the site to hear the 13 acts, with headliners ranging from high-energy contemporary artists like Sugarland, Trace Adkins and Neal McCoy to enduring icons like Glen Campbell and former Alabama frontman Randy Owen.
Since 2003, sound for the Jamboree has been supplied by Portland-based Horne Audio. For company owner J. Peter Horne, the Jamboree is a keystone event in his summer schedule. “It’s certainly one of my bigger events in terms of size and income,” he says. “It’s also very well run. Any issues that come up seem to get resolved in a non-stressful way, which means I can kick back and have some fun.”
Horne was contracted for the Jamboree when the previous sound supplier failed to keep pace with the festival’s growth, according to festival director Peter LaPonte. “Every year Peter [Horne] listens and makes notes,” he says, “and then makes new equipment purchases based on what worked and what didn’t. Also, his monitor engineers are top-of-the-line. We never hear of problems or complaints.”
Covering Ground
To cover the festival grounds, which requires a maximum throw of well over 400 feet to the back of the audience area, Horne deployed an Electro-Voice XLC-based line array system. The main hangs of 12 mid-high cabinets per side were buttressed by 12 XLC-215 subwoofers. A beefed-up side hang of 10 XLC-127 DVX cabs covered the all-important beer garden at stage left, and 10 more of the same (plus four more subs) were placed on a single delay tower behind the FOH mix. Down- and front-fill duties were handled by a total of 10 compact XLD-281 line array cabinets. Everything was amplified by Lab.gruppen FP+ Series and PLM Series units, with three external Dolby Lake Processors shaping the signals for the FP+ racks.
The biggest challenge facing Horne in his system design was the “upside down” seating: Many of the older patrons paid extra to sit up front in the (aptly named?) reserved section, while younger fans of today’s high-dB country sound were partying out in the “back 40.” Ground-stacked subwoofers had proven particularly troublesome. The essence of the problem was recounted by festival director Peter LaPonte: “It was so loud you could feel it slamming your chest. A few years back, one of my staff told me about an older gentleman who angrily walked out saying he was wearing a pacemaker and feared for his safety.”
Horne’s first order of business was flying all the subs. Then he configured and shaded his XLC arrays for an emphasis on the long throw. Essentially, the overriding goal was to throw as much sound to the back as possible while keeping levels under control in the front.
“I beefed up the delays quite a bit this year,” says Horne. “Also, the top six cabinets in the main arrays are the brand new EV XLC-907 DVXs, which are a 90-degree horizontal box. That narrower focus helps to pump up the levels toward the back. When you move out wide of the delays, the coverage is much better this year than in the past.” Horne utilized the EV LAPS software to aid array configuration, then switched to SpectraFoo for final system tuning.
Volunteer Muscle
Thanks to availability of well-instructed volunteer muscle, Horne managed the festival with a bare-bones crew. Horne works as FOH liaison and mixes any opening acts (only one this year) without their own engineer. Mark “Sparky” McNeill was the onstage operations chief, while Don Lindsey turned over monitor mixing/liaison duties to Steve Beatty on Saturday when he had to leave for another mixing commitment.
Up at FOH, the console complement was 100% digital, with Digidesign Venue boards continuing an upward trend. Horne brought along his own pair of the compact D-Show Profile desks, with one permanently stationed for playback and the other available for acts carrying little or no production of their own. Three of the top-billed acts carried the complete FOH and monitor kit, while most supporting acts used Horne’s FOH and monitor packages — as did headliner Randy Owen, who was on a fly date.
“There’s been a definite shift toward the Digidesign boards,” says Horne. “It seems like the country acts have latched on to them even more than in the rock world. We bought our first Profile last year and the second just a few months ago.”
Also new to Horne’s inventory this year are his racks of Lab.gruppen amplifiers. For the Jamboree, all the main house arrays were powered by a total of 24 FP+ Series units (FP 7000, FP 100000 and FP 130000) while delays and monitors were driven by 10 PLM Series Powered Loudspeaker Management Systems with their own built-in Dolby Lake processing.
Horne says he was particularly impressed with the guts of the FP 130000 units that fed the flown subwoofers. “Without the ground coupling that you get with stacked subs, engineers tend to push the flown subs really hard to get low-end you can feel. But the Lab 13ks just cruised right along no matter what we gave them.”
The networked monitoring and control features were also mentioned as a factor in his switch to Lab.gruppen. “The DeviceControl software is very user-friendly and lets me know what’s going on with my load. For example, on setup day I was able to determine quickly that I was missing something. It was a mistake we’d made that showed up right away. We didn’t have to waste a bunch of time tracking it down, or worse yet, do the show lacking a couple of subs.”
A Peculiar Mixed Bag
In monitor world, Horne confronted a peculiar mixed bag for 2008. He owns both Shure and Sennheiser wireless in-ear packages, but nobody asked that he bring either. Most headliners brought their own in-ear rigs, with everybody else happy to use his complement of L-ACOUSTICS 115-XT HiQ wedges. “They are very rider-friendly,” he notes, “and I like the coaxial design because I don’t have to worry about matched left and right pairs.” Horne supplied his own Yamaha PM5D as a monitor console, with about half of the acts bringing their own digital boards, a mix of mostly Digidesign and Yamaha — with one early-in-the-day act even employing Yamaha’s ultra-compact LS-9.
Horne’s 60-plus package of hard-wired microphones — largely Shure with a smattering of AKG, Beyer and Neumann models for targeted applications — was supplemented by 10 channels of Shure UHF-wireless models.
Of course, this is Oregon, and though 99% of the precipitation falls between October and June, the occasional “heavy Oregon mist” does creep up the Willamette Valley on summer days. In this case, it fell almost entirely during the opening act — comic duo Williams and Ree — on Friday. By the time red-hot Sugarland hit the stage to close the night, the tarps were pulled back and the system was ready to prove its mettle.
“I know sound is very subjective, but I’d have to say that Sugarland’s engineer, Dave Haskell, had the rig sound exceptionally good,” says Horne. “The same holds for Trace Adkins’ guy. Each had a unique approach to mixing, but both did a great job of getting their sound out there.”
Festival director Peter LaPorte was even more forthright in his praise, stating, “Sugarland’s show was one of the best sounding I’ve heard anywhere, here or at any other festival, for as far back as I can remember.” He credits Haskell with the artistic judgment, but also acknowledges Horne Audio’s commitment to constant improvement.
“Peter [Horne] really nailed it this year,” he maintains. “It wasn’t too loud up front, but it still had plenty of fullness and clarity all the way to the back. He managed that trick better than ever this year.”
No Limit Off Limits
It should be noted that Horne did not have to be concerned with excessive SPL outside the venue, as is often the case with festivals surrounded by residential neighborhoods. (The balance of the year, the festival site serves as baseball and soccer fields for the adjoining middle school and high school.) “There’s no limit out in the city,” observes Horne. “Nobody checks because they don’t really care. Everybody loves it. It’s the sound of more money coming into their community.”
Also, Sweet Home is a country music kind of town. Early on Friday, residents along 14th Street —next to the festival grounds in line with the main arrays — were putting out lawn chairs and coolers on the front lawns. After all, this was the week when Sugarland was battling “Hannah Montana” for the number one slot on the Billboard Hot 200 (all CD sales, not just country), and these well-located Sweet Home citizens could hear a free show at only slightly reduced levels. Another fringe benefit of community development with a driving beat.
Europe’s Festival Scene
The U.S. isn’t the only hotspot for festival action. In fact, some of the largest festivals are hitting the European countryside, including England’s Glastonbury and Latitude Fests, Solidays Music Festival in Paris and Scotland’s T in the Park.
Glastonbury Festival
England’s Glastonbury Festival is unquestionably Europe’s biggest festival. The three-day festival featured some 500 bands, artists and DJs. The John Peel Stage is one of the main attractions at Glastonbury Festival with 43 bands performing, including The Cribs, Friendly Fires, Patrick Watson and The Futureheads.
The John Peel Stage’s monitor tech Mike Taylor, from Emarty, used HK Audio stage monitoring products for the first time in 2008. Fourteen CT 115 ConTour Series high-/midrange units, biamped with DSM 2060 controllers and Lab.gruppen FP 10000 power amps served as front monitors. Two CT 112 enclosures and four CTA 118 units provided the drum-fill, and one ConTour Array with two CTA 208 and CTA 118 enclosures made up the side-fill system.
Solidays Music Festival
For the past 10 years, the Ile de France region has supported the Solidays music festival to raise AIDS awareness. As this year was the 10th anniversary of the festival, a fifth stage was added and a vast electic selection of hip-hop, rock, reggae and techno artists were invited to perform. French PA company Melpomen, which has provided PA support for the last decade, was able to use three generations of NEXO’s GEO Series line array loudspeakers in their FOH systems.
Out of the five stages, the two largest featured NEXO’s GEO T systems. [The larger of the two had 24 GEO Ts per side with six GEO Subs (flown) per side and six CD18s per side. The smaller GEO T stage had 12 GEO Ts per side and CD18s per side.] Making their first appearance at the festival, the NXAMP 4 x 4 power amplifiers were used to drive the subwoofers won the large GEO T stage.
2008 Latitude Festival
ADLIB Audio supplied sound production and crew for the third year running to Lake Stage, the Film & Music Stage and the Cabaret Arena at the 2008 Latitude Festival. This is one of a host of festivals ADLIB is involved in this Summer.
The Lake Stage was sponsored by the BBC as an “introducing” platform for emerging talent. The tent was a small saddle-span design with relatively low headroom, so the NEXO Alpha PA supplied by Adlib was ground-stacked and comprised two S2 subs, two B1 bass speakers and two M3 mid-highs.
This was powered by Camco amps with NEXO NX242 system processors; all bands were mixed from side stage on a Soundcraft Series 4 console, which was also used to mix six monitor sends. A standard ADLIB outboard FX rack contained a Lexicon PCM 70, Yamaha SPX 990 and 2000s and an Eventide H3000 harmoniser plus Drawmer DS201 gates and DBX 1066 and 160A compressors.
T in the Park
ADLIB Audio also supplied sound for two stages at the T in the Park 2008 festival, staged at Kinross, Scotland; the King Tuts Wah Wah Stage and Slam Stage. Slam Stage’s massive V-shaped dance-orientated tent had a capacity of 20,000. Its shape and scale presented some interesting challenges for ADLIB Crew Chief Hassane Essiahi and his team who worked with Sound Engineer Dave Pringle.
The 40-meter-wide stage — with DJ platform in front — was located at the middle point of the V, leaving large sections toward the edges of the tent needing to be covered. This was achieved with the installation of two delay stacks per side. They chose to use a JBL VerTec system, all ground stacked, with the main stage stacks containing six VT4889 elements a side, augmented with two 4889 per side at the edges of the stage plus AA FD2 infills along the stage lip. For subs, there were eight VT 4880As per side. The four delays comprised three NEXO Alpha S2 subs, three B1 bass and six M3 tops per stack. The FOH console was a Soundcraft Series 5.
