David Lawler and Craig Doubet put their touring chops into HOW installs.
Putting a system together for a tour is one thing. All the equipment has to be flexible enough to consistently work in acoustically challenging rooms; it has to go up and down easily and deliver quality audio. This challenge, for some, is daunting, especially with the pressure of thousands of expectant fans who surround the FOH position nightly.
A live installation system is just as intimidating, considering the issues are similar — dealing with acoustics, fidelity demands, flexibility concerns — but an installer doesn’t have the ability to adjust on the fly like an engineer does on a day-by-day basis.
It’s enough to make the average person quake in their Keds, yet David Lawler and Craig Doubet have enough experience in both markets to approach the challenge with confidence. The duo has an impressive set of FOH mixing credits including Diana Krall, Michael Bublé, k.d. lang, Luis Miguel and dozens of others. They’ve also handled design/install projects for the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Kodak Theatre and Bass Performance Hall. Lawler and Doubet also count on Eric Laliberte, who they call a sound web guru and networking expert.
“We’re the guys who have worked in a lot of theaters and tried a lot of things,” Doubet states. “We know how to answer the question: ‘Okay, I have this rig and I’m going into this room. How do I make it work?’ We can tell people that we’ve done it and we know what works.”
Life In the Balance
For the past couple of years, the team has balanced road gigs with installation assignments at two houses of worship in Southern California — Laguna Presbyterian Church in Laguna Beach and Templo Calvario, an Assembly of God church in Santa Ana. The two installs are as different as their style of worship, although both are projects that Lawler and Doubet were able to influence early on.
Laguna Presbyterian Church is in the midst of a complete renovation and seismic retrofit that has taken the building all the way down to studs. Lawler was able to get into the sanctuary to analyze the acoustics of the room before it was demolished.
“The reverberation time in the room was shorter than usual,” he reports. “We liked that, so we’re trying to emulate a similar time.” In addition to watching the design of the room and adding his opinion where possible, Lawler will be using a spray-on product to touch up the room’s acoustics to ensure the short reverberation time. That’s important, Lawler says, because church events rely so much on the spoken word where, in his opinion, a shorter reverberation time is crucial.
One of the pluses of working on a project that is basically a new construction is the access to the walls for running conduit. Lawler and Doubet are maximizing that opportunity before installing a Meyer Sound Labs Constellation system to make sure they can get the speakers and microphones in the proper location to get adequate coverage.
As for other gear going into the new church, the team is looking at smaller sized Meyer CQ and UPJ boxes. The two systems will be interfaced via the Constellation’s Matrix3 processors. “They have CobraNet as well as analog, so we will be interfacing the two together for certain areas where there’s coverage needed, but we don’t want to put double systems in,” he says. Examples of those areas include lobbies, crying rooms and under balconies.
The FOH position will be located in the rear balcony, but a desk has not yet been selected because the team wanted to keep their options open. “They do have a praise band, so it has to be at least 32 channels,” Doubet reports. “They also have a need to be able to take some of the stuff outside and put it in a courtyard, so it has to be portable. We’ll probably give them UPJ monitors that can turn into speakers on stands and the console can roll out the door.”
One of the other challenges at LPC was working with a large vintage pipe organ that was installed sometime in the late 1920s. The organ had to be removed during the demolition and the decision was made to add MIDI voices to it when it was reinstalled. “I did a giant research project on how pipe organs work these days,” Lawler states. “The keyboard is basically a high-class MIDI controller. Of course, mechanically that’s great because there is much less going on in the actual keyboard unit as far as maintenance and reliability goes.” The construction is ongoing with an anticipated reopening date of Easter 2009.
Going Big
Templo Calvario is slated to open sometime this fall and the system that Lawler and Doubet are installing has to work in more of a commercial-style building that features a giant stage, flat ceiling and seating for about 4,000 congregants.
One of the challenges at the new space, Lawler reports, was ceiling height. “It’s always tricky trying to interface sound, lighting and everything else and get it high enough to not be in the sight lines and to have even distribution,” he says.
To overcome that challenge the team selected Meyer M’elodie arrays. “We have low-mid cabinets in there as well as subwoofers so that the line array didn’t have to be so long to get low mid control,” Lawler explains. “We are actually doing it as a three-box system so you can high pass the line array higher and not have it go backwards on to the stage.” There will also be distributed sound, he adds, to cover the wide balcony.
A console for FOH has yet to be selected, but Lawler points out that they are always thinking of ease of use when choosing gear. In fact, it’s rare that the two will spec in a piece of gear that they haven’t used before. “We don’t change our brands much, unless there is a compelling reason to do so,” he says. “We don’t change because there’s a sale on something. We are always open to new ideas, mind you, because things are changing, but I like working with stable companies, and equipment is there for a reason.”
For the most part, he adds, their systems feature a short signal path that runs from Sennheiser and Neumann microphones to a console through either BSS Sound Web or Meyer Galileo via Rapco wiring to Meyer powered speakers. “There are not many devices in the signal path,” Lawler says. “That has been reliable and the results have been very predictable for us.”
Doubet concurs and adds: “We try to make all of our installs rider-friendly, so we’re going to use the same stuff that people want to use on the road. The only difference is that instead of chain motors, perhaps there is a winch or a permanent hang. Even then, all of our installs are done so they can be taken out very easily and put back in.”
The key to their success so far, both agree, is the combination of road experience and technical knowledge. “On tour, we get to use and (Meyer) SIM all brands of consoles, processors and speaker systems,” Lawler reports. “That helps us, too, to keep abreast of what everybody else’s progress is as well. We’re not just going to trade shows looking at it, but we’re using it. I think that helps us when we are advising people about why they should use something or not, because we’ve done it.”
