Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns Help Keep the South Point Showroom Rocking
They may be named after New Mexico’s capital, but since 1975, Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns have been based in Las Vegas (Nevada, not New Mexico).
Under the leadership of guitarist and bandleader Jerry Lopez, they have performed big-brass hits by Chicago, Earth Wind & Fire, Tower of Power and their own compositions, swinging back and forth from classic rock stylings to Latin rhythms for an appreciative audience that tends to skew toward a local crowd.
On a regular basis, an accomplished artist — or two or three — are in the crowd, many in the same Baby Boomer/Gen-X cohort as most of the band members. And after a bit of good-natured cajoling from Lopez, most can be counted upon to join the 15-piece band onstage. (The night FOH attended, Santana vocalist Tony Lindsay joined the band for a few numbers.)
Southward Ho
This past September, the band, a Monday night institution of sorts at The Lounge within The Palms Casino just off the Strip for more than a half-dozen years, made its move south to the South Point, which is right on Las Vegas Boulevard but a few miles south of the Strip’s main attractions.
Many of the band’s longtime members are only available to perform together consistently on Monday nights, when bigger showroom stages in Las Vegas tend to go dark. So Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns maintains its Monday night performance schedule at the South Point as well.
The management at South Point Casino welcomed the veteran band to its 400-seat Showroom, providing the various performers with just enough elbowroom to avoid stepping on each other’s toes, and giving audience members a decent-sized dance floor as well.
A “True Concert Venue”
Sonny Maupin, owner of New World Audio, whom bandleader Lopez often lauds as the “16th band member,” has been handling the mix for the performers from both its years at the Palms and the South Point. Of the latter, he notes, it’s “a true concert venue,” with a setup that supports major headlining artists.
“For its size, I think it’s one of the nicest rooms in town,” says Maupin, who played keyboards in the band back in the early 1980s. “Everything’s right — the gear’s right, they’ve got a great crew — you don’t get that in a lot of places anymore.”
Maupin mixes the 37 inputs coming from the stage — including the band’s six-piece horn section, two guitars, two keyboards, two drum kits and up to six vocalists — on a PRO6 48, which is augmented with three I/O and DL431/DL451 units.
The FOH speaker setup includes 16 QSC WideLine WL2102 enclosures, six QSC WL218-sw subwoofers and four QSC GP118-sw subs. EAW JF80z speakers are added at the stage lip for frontfill, and QSC AP-5122 enclosures are flown for sidefills.
The backstage crew working along with Maupin in the South Point Showroom most Monday nights (the band’s shows typically run from 10 p.m. or so to just past midnight) include monitor engineer Lou Carto, systems engineer Jason Lein, LD/programmer/operator Joey Juliano and spot operator Bryce Gelkin.
From Nightclub to Live Stage
Michael Gaughan, a racing enthusiast who won the 1966 Mint 400 desert road race and later owned the South Point NASCAR auto racing team, parlayed his ownership of Las Vegas’ Barbary Coast casino (now the Cromwell) into Coast Casinos, which was acquired by Boyd Gaming for a reported $1.3 billion in 2004.
Coast Casinos then opened the 622-room South Coast Casino just before New Year’s 2006, which was built for an estimated $500 to $600 million. By mid-2006, Boyd announce that it would sell the property to Gaughan (who divested his Boyd holdings to make the purchase) for an estimated $576 million. On Oct. 24, 2006, Gaughan renamed the property South Point Casino.
From the beginning, the South Point showroom was designed as a multi-level, multi-purpose space, notes Jason Lein. “It opened as a nightclub, a live entertainment venue and a lounge facility all in one,” he says. “That’s why you see some of the design elements the way they are,” including the large mirror ball over the dance floor. Not long after opening, the owners opted to veer away from the nightclub business and focus on live entertainment.
Along with the initial investment in the venue’s QSC WideLine sound system, the casino’s owners invested significantly overall within the past two years. That upgrade included new drivers for the speakers and all the back-end processing, along with the PRO6 consoles at FOH and at monitoring position on stage right.
Today, the venue stands as one of the busiest performance spaces in Las Vegas. As Lein and South Point Showroom’s LD Joey Juliano note, it’s been used six or seven days a week — almost every day — since it opened, and might just be the only venue in Las Vegas to host headlining artists 52 weeks a year, on top of all the other acts appearing day after day each week.
After Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns do their thing on Mondays, on the heels of the space’s Monday Night Football games, the venue hosts a Motown show on Tuesdays, another retro act (Déjà Vu) on Wednesdays, Dennis Bono’s nationally syndicated musical variety/talk show on Thursdays, that week’s headlining act on Friday (followed by another show, called Metal Shop, later on Friday Nights), then the same headliner for a show on Saturday.
Although the weekly headliners such as Tower of Power and Tony Orlando might not have the same high-ticket drawing power as the Las Vegas Strip residencies a few miles north for Elton John, Celine Dion, Carlos Santana or Britney Spears, the sound system is anything but second-rate. “It’s a pleasure to work in there,” Maupin says. “I think it’s one of the nicest rooms in town.”
Monday Night Changeovers
After fine-tuning its subwoofer placement to optimize the listening experience within the showroom’s relatively wide floor plan, systems engineer Jason Lein says the speaker setup was ready to accommodate the Fat City Horns and any other big, complex band heading its way.
“Our biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to flip the room,” he says. “Coming in right after Monday Night Football,” where the big NFL games are projected during the football season, “and having to set up a band this big that quickly, and do sound check with them in an hour — from a show standpoint, was the main hurdle.”
The sound check window gets even narrower on nights when the football game goes into extended overtime — as it did with the Monday night matchup between the Indianapolis Colts and Carolina Panthers game on Nov. 2.
Even so, as Lein notes, “we’re used to having a 40-to-50-input artist on a small stage, and having to flip to another show an hour later, all the time. So we’ve got all the right tools and sufficient guys to flip large setups.”
The venue is designed to accommodate pretty much any audio need a performer might have. “Whatever they don’t have, I bring in,” Lein continues, “and we set it up for them. Plus, we handle their shows.”
For Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns, for example, Maupin’s New World Audio brought in the six clip-on Shure Beta 98 mics used for the horn section. Otherwise, “they have a great selection of mics here. I’m pretty flexible on that, so between what they had and I brought in, we were covered.”
Along with the New World Audio-supplied Beta 98s, the house-supplied mic setup includes five Shure Beta 58s for the vocals, including four that are wireless and one that’s hardwired.
The main drum kit, isolated behind Plexiglas, is heard via Shure Beta 91, Audix D6, Audix i5, two Shure KSM41 and two KSM137 mics, with a pair of Audix D4 and Audix D2 mics for toms. For percussion, the setup includes Shure SM57 and Sennheiser 604 mics. And a Radial ProDI and BSS AR-133 are provided for keyboards.
Wedges, In-Ears, Front Fills
At stage right, monitor engineer Lou Carto works with individual band members to get the precise tone they’re looking for using a PRO6 with “dedicated preamps for everything,” Lein notes.
As with many acts performing at the South Point, Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns performs with a mix of in-ears and wedges. “We probably do the majority with wedges, versus in-ears,” Lein says. “It’s just what they’re used to. On the small stage, we’d prefer it to be all in-ears, but that’s not the case.”
He notes the challenges posed by the wide-but-not-so-deep stage within the venue’s relatively wide listening area. “The stage is only 22 feet deep. It’s very easy for the stage to intermix with your house mix. So it’s definitely a balancing act, keeping in contact with the monitor engineer and making sure everything’s in line.”
The final piece of the audio puzzle — front fill speakers — play a modest role, as the QSC WideLine WL2102 line array cabinets provide the lion’s share of room coverage with their 140-degree angle of dispersed coverage. “We don’t really need much, unless you’re sitting within five feet of the stage, right in the middle.” For those guests who are in that position, the two EAW JF80z speakers are more than adequate.
Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns
Venue
South Point Casino Showroom, Las Vegas, NV
Crew
FOH Engineer: Sonny Maupin/New World Audio
Monitor Engineer: Lou Carto
Systems Engineer: Jason Lein
Gear
FOH
Console: PRO6 48 (37 inputs from stage); (3) I/O, DL431, DL451
Speakers: (16) QSC WideLine WL2102 (eight/side)
Subwoofers: (6) QSC WL218-sw, (4) QSC GP118-sw subs
Sidefills: QSC AP-5122 (flown)
Frontfills: EAW JF80z (stage lip)
Amps: (2) QSC CXD4.5Q, (16) QSC PL230 (bridged)
Processing: QSC Q-SYS 500i Core, (4) QSC Q-SYS I/O Frame, Waves Multi-Rack, RPM Dynamics TB248/48
Snake Assemblies: (4) Whirlwind 16-channel sub snakes
MON
Console: PRO6
Speakers: (8) EAW SM500 wedges, QSC AP-5122 (flown, sidefills)
Processing: Q-SYS, Klark Teknik DN9680, DN32Dante
Amps: (3) QSC CXD4.5Q
IEMs: (6) Shure PSM 1000
Mics: (6) Shure Beta 98 H/C clip-on wireless (horns); (5) Shure Beta 58 (4 wireless, 1 hardwired, vocals), Shure Beta 91, Audix D6, Audix i5, (2) Shure KSM41, (2) KSM137 (drums), (2) Audix D4, (2) Audix D2 (toms), Shure SM57, Sennheiser 604 (percussion)
Direct Boxes: Radial ProDI, BSS AR-133 (keyboards)
Wireless: (2) Shure ULX-D Quad, Shure ULX-D Dual, (6) Shure ULXD1 w/ Shure BETA98H/C, (4) Shure ULXD2
