Today, I am enjoying a Sunday off in a hotel room outside of Youngstown, Ohio. As I write this article, the NASCAR race from Pocono Raceway is just getting underway. My laundry is now done. After finding the nearby Starbucks, I then enjoyed a leisurely lunch on the bus in the hotel parking lot. Sounds idyllic enough, doesn’t it? Actually, today is only notable when viewed in contrast to yesterday’s workday at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City, NJ. However, before discussing yesterday’s events, I need to skip backward in time one more day.
This past Friday, the James Taylor tour performed in the Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Because the next show was the first of a back-to-back with Atlantic City, and knowing that the load-out in Greensboro is slow, management moved show time up from 8 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The intention was to give the drivers and crew a head start on the estimated nine-hour drive time up to New Jersey.
As it turned out, the large crowd was a little slow coming in, and James didn’t hit the stage until 7:45 p.m. Greensboro was the only show in James’ home state of North Carolina on this year’s schedule and, rather understandably, there was a lot of interaction with the crowd between songs and during intermission. James is incredibly gracious with the fans, and he almost always spends intermission signing autographs and having his picture taken with his supporters. In addition, the appreciative audience bestowed several standing ovations upon James throughout the course of the evening.
By the time the show went down, it was almost as if we had started a half hour later, and the net gain in time turned out to be negligible. But we rolled out of Greensboro still hoping to get to the Borgata by 10 a.m. One variable that wasn’t factored into the plan was Saturday morning traffic heading to Atlantic City. Our crew buses lost nearly an hour while mired in bumper-to-bumper traffic. We rolled into the Borgata closer to 11 a.m.
A Tight Squeeze
We aren’t a big show, by modern standards — only five trucks — but the load-in at the Borgata isn’t a very quick one. The loading dock is a floor below the theater level, and all the gear had to be loaded into the large freight elevator, unloaded one floor up, and then pushed down a long corridor into the showroom. The local crew at the casino is very experienced, and they do a great job performing all the necessary tasks as efficiently as possible. However, the rigging height of the venue is rather low, and we had to cut down or otherwise modify many elements of the lighting, video and audio systems.
Our normal front-facing P.A. column consists of 18 flown Clair Global i-3 line array cabinets supplemented by six Clair i-5B single-18 flown subwoofer boxes. Both vertical enclosure arrays had been designed to fly from a single bumper with the subs occupying the offstage side. The decorative ceiling at the Borgata is a suspended lattice of squares that are smaller than the length of our bumpers. It was our intention to fly 12 i-3 cabinets and four i-5B subs per side, but using the bumpers didn’t allow us to get the bottom boxes high enough above the stage. At that point, our hopes for a rapid and simple deployment of the sound system went right out the window.
Clair systems engineer, Andy Sottile, the local riggers and I devised a way to fly both the i-3s and the i-5B subs from two individual 2-motor hangs that that allowed each pair of chain hoists to fit within the lattice squares. The columns were still close enough together to retain overall coherence, and we were able to run the motors above the lattice level to achieve the proper height. Both Andy and I were very grateful to the local riggers who worked tirelessly and with great ingenuity to make our concepts work.
In the arenas and sheds we have been playing on this summer tour, the front-facing bumper usually flies from onstage, and offstage 1-ton motors lying in the same vertical plane. In our present situation, Andy had to devise a way to hang the i-3 column from upstage and downstage motors that would be more closely spaced than we normally encounter. Getting the separately hung subwoofer column to line up correctly with the i-3s was a greater challenge. But with Andy’s creativity, the persistence of the house riggers and the flexibility of the Clair rigging system, adapting our tour gear to the present situation slowly evolved into a successful solution. The task required a combination of top bars, shackles, deck chains, ropes and come-alongs to make it all hang in proper alignment, but the final result was excellent.
Andy Sottile and I have been working shows together at the Borgata since the room first opened in 2003, when we came through there with Steely Dan. The venue is a large ballroom that has been converted into a showroom by adding a large grandstand with seats and also placing many rows of unattached plush chairs on the floor in front of the grandstand. The room is basically a large square, so the floor seating covers a very wide area. The Clair i-3 system has extremely broad (130°) horizontal coverage, and a single column is perfect for most of the room.
But even that very wide coverage misses the triangular areas on the far sides of the floor that are nearest the stage. We have found that a small floor stack of i-3s aimed out toward these seats works very well. Our original plan had been to stack two i-3 boxes on top of the three double-18 ground subs we deploy on stage left and stage right. The Borgata staff has left out one four-by-eight-foot riser section at each downstage corner of the stage to serve as cutouts for tucking in ground-deployed subs.
Our stacking plan was thwarted when our monitor engineer discovered that she needed to set up her console on the floor off stage left and all the way downstage. She had to occupy this area in order to have line of sight to all the band members. Placing anything on top of the subs would block her view of James, so that idea was history. Now the stacked i-3s had to be moved offstage to be far away from monitor beach. We tipped a Clair Cadillac trunk off its wheels and used it as a four-foot tall pedestal for the stacked i-3s. We would then be able to use the Lake controller to add the necessary delay to get the speaker elements back in line with the main system.
A Tight Schedule
At this point, the only problem we could foresee was the rapidly approaching deadline of the 4 p.m. sound check. We advised production that we could be ready for the band just a little later. We are well into this summer’s tour, and the sound system has been tweaked out very precisely. I didn’t anticipate taking much time to tune the cut-down system we had just finished arraying. Both Andy and I thought the hard part of the day was finally over.
After everything was wired and Andy had run pink noise through each individual amplifier channel, he turned the Lake controller tablet over to me. Since the S-4 days, Clair speaker systems have always used amplifier and cabling configurations that address groups or “blocks” of four cabinets. The i-3 system is no different, and the 12-high i-3 columns each contained three blocks of four enclosures. On the controller, I muted everything but the left and right blocks that were aimed at the mix position. These were the middle four cabinets in each column.
A New Problem
As soon as I heard the music playing through these isolated units, however, I knew we had a new problem. I auditioned every other block in the system to ascertain that the problem was confined to the one area where the problem was occurring. Having done that, I called Andy on the radio and requested that he come to FOH. Thankfully, Andy Sottile is an extremely competent and intelligent systems engineer. When I handed him back the tablet, he went through a thorough process of observation and analysis that resulted in the determination that the crossover controlling these particular speakers had somehow become corrupted.
In order to rapidly undo the damage, it was necessary to load a clean version of our controller setup. This did fix the problem, and the result was a correctly operating controller — but with all my user-entered settings wiped. Two months of equalization, level and delay settings were now gone. A rough day just got rougher. I asked production to give me an extra half hour to bang out a rapid tuning. Luckily, Andy and I have done more shows on Clair i-3s than any other pair of engineers, and I knew what I needed to do. We got the band on stage only one hour late.
The show at the Borgata went very well, so I guess all is well that ends well. But I don’t need a lot of days like this one.
Safe Travels!
