Anderson Audio and East Shore Sound Team Up For a Night of Motown In the East Room
It's not just another gig. It's the White House. There, sitting in the front row, just a few feet from the slightly-elevated stage in the East Room, is the President of the United States, the First Lady and the Vice-President and his wife. Other dignitaries are scattered throughout the crowd of about 220. Enormous paintings of George and Martha Washington hang on the walls behind the stage. Ornate chandeliers are further reminders of the room's rich history and opulence.
But on this night, Feb. 24, 2011, the East Room is a concert venue. And a one-hour television program, produced by the D.C. PBS affiliate WETA, titled In Performance at the White House: The Motown Sound, was telecast nationally on PBS on March 1. It featured a parade of stars struttin' their stuff in front of the eight-piece band, a Black History Month salute to Motown that included performances by Jamie Foxx, Sheryl Crow, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Seal, John Legend, Natasha Bedingfield, Ledisi and Gloriana, among others.
Unique Challenges
As one might expect, putting on a show – a televised one at that – in the East Room of the White House poses unique challenges for everyone involved on the technical side. On the SR/production end, a pair of companies has been working shows in the East Room for some time now. Anderson Audio (Harrisburg, PA), which provided the P.A. and front-of-house mixer Chris Anderson, has helped put on many shows there for the past two administrations. Anderson works closely with East Shore Sound (Jarrettsville, MD), which managed the house audio requirements and handle the monitoring system, RF coordination and communication needs – intercom, headsets and such.
Before we get to show time, however, we have to get all the gear into the White House. "Security is pretty intense," says ESS' Bill Saltzer. "You usually have to empty the truck out and open all the cases, and they pretty much go through everything with flashlights to make sure speakers are speakers and mics are mics. Between human resources and some canine help, they certainly check everything out very carefully." And there are actually two security checkpoints to pass through: one beyond the outer perimeter of the White House grounds before the trucks even hit Pennsylvania Avenue, and then one at the main entrance gate. A semi-circular driveway leads up to a set of doors near the East Room, and then, tremendous care must be taken during the load-in: The stairs leading up to that entrance are marble, as is the hallway outside the East Room. "Once you're inside, you can't roll or place anything directly on the hardwood parquet floors in the East Room," Saltzer notes. "You have to have carpet down or sheets of Masonite to protect the floor. After all, it is a museum in a sense: at the White House they like to refer to it as ‘The People's House.' So we pay a lot of respect to the venue."
Tight Quarters
Saltzer adds that, "also, there's a very limited amount space at the White House. In a typical arena, if you take up 20 feet for monitor beach, it's no big deal; there's plenty of room on the floor. Here, we have less than 20 feet for two consoles, RF gear – mics, ears and wireless intercom – splitters, and a rack of preamps for the record truck. So everything down to splitters gets repackaged to maximize efficiency and minimize space." Indeed, even though for a concert like this much of the 40-by-80-foot room is taken up by up to 10 television cameras and the front-of-house and monitor positions (which are near the back off to one side), "space is always at a premium," agrees Chris Anderson. "Directly upstage behind the drummer are doors that go out onto the roof over the East Wing, and that's where all the empties go, the dimmer racks, the cable that comes in from the truck and from the generators; everything that comes from outside. The amp racks used to go out there, but now we're using self-powered boxes." During the Motown event, "it rained the whole show so we had to use a lot of tarps out there to keep things dry."
The room itself presents its own set of SR issues. With a horizontal stage configuration (the room is sometimes played vertically), it is very wide and not very deep. There are long drapes that absorb sound covering tall windows, but also numerous reflective surfaces – plaster walls and ceiling, large mirrors and also three enormous chandeliers, including one right above where the President sits. "Every little crystal on those chandeliers scatter sound, and you can't shoot through them," Anderson notes. "From a PA approach, visually it needs to be out of the way, and you don't want it on the ground, of course." Nothing can be hung from the beautiful 18-foot ceiling, so both the PA and lighting hang from "a 20-inch box truss that's trimmed about as tight to the ceiling as they can get it," Anderson says.
Downward Focus
For the Motown show, Anderson tried a different loudspeaker configuration than he had at past East Room shows: The main PA array, which was hung quite wide of the stage, consisted of four EAW NTL720 self-powered loudspeakers and two EAW NTS250 flyable subwoofers per side; chosen, Anderson says, for their compactness, power, fidelity and wide coverage. The arrays were hung focused slightly downward. "We're trying to keep sound off the walls and off the ceiling, and we don't want to blow it around the room," Anderson comments. "We minimize reflections, because the PA is playing down into the softest thing in the room, which is the audience."
The biggest challenge, Anderson says, "is getting sound onto the center where the VIPs are." Here, the solution was using four EAW JF60s as front fills, interspersed with the footlights, angled up slightly, a few feet from the front row. "The President could probably kick those if he wanted to, they're so close," Anderson laughs. "We do a lot of sitting out in his seat during soundchecks, because as far as we're concerned, that's where we're mixing for. For the front fills, I tend to emphasize lead vocals, any featured instrument, and any instrument that is not acoustically coming from the stage in the first place." Though rehearsals for the show took place in a ballroom at the nearby W Hotel in D.C., there were also soundchecks in the East Room as White House scheduling permitted.
On the monitor end, Saltzer says, "the venue is so intimate, if everybody used wedges, the spill would create problems for both the house and record mix. Combine this with the fact that the leader of the free world is sitting literally four feet from the edge of the stage, and you really need to control the stage volume as much as possible. We were able to accomplish this by having the Motown band use in-ear monitors along with Roland M-48 Personal Mixers. A lot of the performers were on ears mixed from the monitor desk, but we also had some wedges down front because not everybody's comfortable on ears."
The Roland M-48s have grown popular among musicians because the system allows them to create and control a personal mix for nearly any monitoring environment, including headphones, IEMs and wedges. In this case, having the band up and running on the M-48s meant that Saltzer and his ESS crew could devote more time concentrating on the monitor needs of the guest singers and players. For a gig that had limited soundcheck time, that turned out to be critical.
The audio end of the broadcast was handled by the Music Mix Mobile truck parked right outside the East Room, with Jay Vicari the principal mixer for this show, and from the truck's perspective, everything seemed to work fine – stage volume was manageable, the PA was out of sight and the performances exceptional in most cases. The President got to forget about his troubles for an hour, and the sound crews got to see some of the most powerful people in the world enjoying the fruits of their labor – smiling, bobbing heads, singing along. As a show of respect, most of the sound personnel wore suits during the performance. That's not going to happen at a Metallica gig.
"It's always a little humbling," Chris Anderson admits, "but you don't have time to be in awe. You still have a job to do."
