Long before Billy Joel hit the first notes on his piano during the inaugural date at The Show, a new venue at the Agua Caliente Casino, Resort and Spa in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Kevin Rummel was walking into a meeting to fine tune the room’s audio, lighting and projection systems.
“The executive director of construction wanted to have a lot of meetings to go over all the specs,” the production manager explains. “So I would get all of the line drawings and specs, then we would go over every single item to make sure the infrastructure was correct. There were a lot of things we checked and a lot of things we changed because things came up. Like, we had to make sure we were hanging the PA at the right angle. We couldn’t hang it at 30 degrees. We ended hanging it at seven degrees. I wanted five, but we got it to work.
“We also had to make sure the room was earthquake-proofed,” he continues, “and we had to make sure the structure was correct, the cables were coming down in the right places and all the conduits were there. That saved us time once we got stuff up in the air, because we were prepared.”
Rummel, who had designed a handful of other rooms for the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, based The Show on the Pearl venue at Palms Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. “We took what they had done, fixed the problems they had and made it a beautiful venue,” he says.
While Rummel took the lead on the technical design, he relied on the theatrical consulting firm of Auerbach Pollock Friedlander and the expertise of the staff at Sound Image, who served as the vendor and installation company.
A Flexible Budget
One of the things that Rummel had in his favor early on was the tribe’s willingness to open the budget. “They gave me every dime I needed to make this a self-contained room where the artist can come in and use all our gear or patch in with their gear to run the PA,” he says.
The Show seats 2,000 for any given performance (and approximately 1,800 for a boxing or MMA fight), and the farthest seat from the stage is 125 feet. During the opening weekend, Billy Joel played an exclusive VIP show, Matchbox Twenty played the next night and Martina McBride graced the stage on Sunday night. A wide variety of acts like Elvis Costello, ZZ Top and Lewis Black have been booked into the room through the summer.
Remembering the Riders
With that in mind, Rummel elected for a rig that would fill the room without overpowering it. “I knew that we were going to be doing everything from banquet events to special events like Mother’s Day brunches to a whole variety of musical genres from reggae to rock and roll to country,” he says. “I looked at a lot of riders and I saw Meyer requested a lot.”
Rummel was familiar with Meyer’s product line and knew that the MICA would be the right pick for the space. The main rig features ten MICA boxes, four 600HP subs and three CQ2s per side. Nine M1Ds are used for front fills and a pair of UPA-2P with two USW-1P subwoofers is used as on stage side fills.
The PA, he adds, is dead hung. “If a touring act comes in and wants to hang their own PA they can hang right next to it,” he explains. “There are points right next to it on stage.”
Rummel also brought in a Meyer Galileo 616 loudspeaker management system to make it easier on touring FOH engineers. “If they want to do an EQing on the PA it’s right there,” Rummel points out. “The room his been SIMmed by Meyer and it sounds really good, but they can do it if they need to.”
For monitors, Rummel opted to stay with Meyer and has 12 UM-1Ps and six UM-100Ps. To power the monitors he is using Meyer’s self powered system with active speaker management. “We also have a personal monitor package here, just in case an artist loses their gear on the road and they need one,” he says. “We have the whole system, from buds to receivers, and they can use them without a problem.”
Rummel says the choice of consoles was also influenced by what he had seen on riders. He brought in a pair of Yamaha PM5D-RHs for both FOH and monitor positions. Other gear at FOH includes a Brain Storm DCD-8 world clock timecode unit and a Whirlwind 56 channel splitter with transformers.
“I felt very strongly about having the right splitter, so that bands would want to use our splitter versus running their snake,” he says. “I wanted there to be as much fiber as possible, so there as a lot less latency going on.”
Rummel also dedicated a fair amount of time and budget to finding and buying a selection of microphones that could be used on a variety of gigs. The venue’s microphone includes a handful of Shure SM-57s, Beta57s, SM-58s, Beta 58As along with Sennheiser MD421s and E609s and Beyer M88s.
Of course, anyone who has planned and executed an install knows that gear is only a fraction of the venue’s success. Instead, it is how the entire room comes together including the audio and lighting rigs.
“When you design something, especially something at this caliber, you have to make sure all the sight lines are extraordinary and that nothing gets in the way of any view,” he says. “There’s a lot of work that goes into it and the mock ups we did helped, especially when we started to hang things and move them a couple of feet here or there.”
Rummel’s heard good things from all of the bands and engineers who have come through, but the one that’s meant the most so far was from Martina McBride’s husband. “When John McBride told me that the room sounded great, I knew I had done a good job,” Rummel recalls. “I kinda felt I had a future in this business.”
