Simply called Cropredy Festival for the first three decades, the annual folk-oriented fête is held each August in the fields just east of the village of Cropredy 50 miles south of Birmingham, England, attracts mostly campers to a single stage at the lower end of a sloping arena field flanked by a fabulous assortment of food vendors.
Begun in 1976 as a private concert for 750 locals by electric folk band Fairport Convention, it has grown annually, expanding to two days in 1980 due to increasing numbers of guest acts. Members of Fairport still organize the festival, and the band gives a closing three hour marathon performance that ends with "Meet on the Ledge," Fairport's unofficial anthem and signal to fans that there'll be no more encores.
This year, the first of three days opened with the traditional Fairport Convention acoustic set, followed by folk duo Katriona Gilmore & Jamie Roberts, young folk son Blair Dunlop, the 30-year reunion of U.K. retro folk-rock act Home Service, American hillbilly-pop act Hayseed Dixie (originally AC/Dixie) and closing with perennial U.K. favorite UB40 (an SSE Productions account for two decades). Sound services were provided by SSE, which is in its 35th year and its 20th year of providing festival support.
Compared to the rest of SSE's summer crop of festivals, Cropredy draws a mere 20,000 folk and acoustic music fans and, since the stage faces up a gently sloping hill, a simple "ten-drop" of L-Acoustic K-1 was plenty, with three of the new KARA under-hung, with 110° coverage that was smooth at its extremes.
With barricades 30 feet from the downstage edge, a stereo pair of KARA triples on cable trunks was employed as front-fill. Double 4-box stacks of SB28 – with bottom cabinets reversed in a cardioid configuration – were ground-stacked below the mains at each side of the stage. Naturally all were powered with LA8 controller amps.
At Front of House, four consoles were used. A Yamaha LS9-16 was used as a production desk by SSE system tech Chris Courtney to take the MC's RF mics and between-act CD and iPod playback. Below it an HHB Dual Burn CDR882 stands by to record, in a rack that also houses an Antelope Isochrone clock and a Lectrosonics Venue receiver used for the Smaart wireless reference mics.
A Soundcraft Vi6 console at the front of the FOH riser was used by the majority of the festival's mostly folk-oriented acts and chosen for both sound quality and ease of use by visiting engineers. This is the first year that all of SSE's festivals are being produced with digital consoles. Visiting engineers are welcome to bring their own desks, and back at the shop in SSE's long-term storage are multiple Midas analog consoles of various popular vintages.
A DiGiCo D5 for the evening's headliner UB40 was next to it, with ample outboard analog kit alongside: a vintage ‘bel' BD-80 delay, a TC D-TWO, an Eventide UltraHarmonizer, an SPX-990 on its "Concert Hall" setting, a TC M5000 with "480 Hall" loaded in both machines, plus a dbx 120A Subharmonic Synthesizer.
Behind the UB40's DiGiCo sat an Avid Profile, available for file-based acts, though none appeared on Day 1. "Most acts that rely on a console file, especially Americans, are using Avid Profiles, so this is the default for most of our festivals at FOH, usually paired with a PM5D on monitors," SSE's Peter Russell explained. "On most of our other festivals, alternating pairs of Profiles and PM5Ds are standard." SSE has 10 of each in inventory.
All four consoles' outputs were combined into the system with a Dolby Lake Processor, which feeds a Lake LM26 that returned their feeds to the stage via Dante to a pair of LM26, one on each side of the stage, for distribution to the various zones of the PA. This Dante return scheme has been employed since early in the season at this year's Download Festival at Donnington.
The FOH Profile and Soundcraft Vi6 were each paired with their own Yamaha PM5D on stage right, manned by Jasen Hattans, while across the stage a DiGiCo SD8 served UB40's monitor mixes in the headliner's stage-left monitor beach. Assisting on stage were SSE's Glenn Little, Miles Barton and Ray Breen.
Across the front of the stage, there were five pairs of Nexo NX45 wedges powered by Nexo Nx4 amps. Upstage, there were numerous MB4 wedges – SSE's proprietary in-house floor monitor, each loaded with an RCF 15 and a B&C compression driver – that have served for years prior to this year's Nexo acquisition. On-stage sidefills consisted of pairs of L-Acoustics ARCS on top of pairs of SB218 subs on end.
The microphone selection on stage was primarily based on Shure products with a plentitude of SM-58 vocal mics and BSS AR-116 DIs. As most festivals require a recording split on stage, SSE's standard is to supply a rack with a half-dozen XTA DS800 4-way active splitters on stage, in this case to accommodate BBC's red truck. Cropredy takes next year off, as it does every five years, to let the fields recover.
