Carlson Provides Clear Sound for Seattle’s Massive, Multigenre Bumbershoot Festival
Could Bumbershoot be the most eclectic music festival on the planet? It’s definitely got a serious claim. Where else can you hear hip-hop, post-modern jazz and Mongolian throat singing, with blues, gospel, folk and gypsy punk on the side, all on the same ticket? And we’re not talking generic genre bands: Bumbershoot organizers find and book trendsetters and scene-stealers. This year’s bill included the Wu-Tang Clan, Fergie, John Legend, Sam Yahel with Joshua Redman Jr. and Brian Blade, and Yungchen Lhamo. Plus Robbie Laws, the Holmes Brothers, Bert Jansch and Gogol Bordello. (If you don’t have a scorecard or the festival program handy, or don’t know the names, refer to the list of musical styles above for clues.)
Bumbershoot is also amazingly family-friendly — with 16 venues going from late morning to almost midnight, there’s something for anyone, anytime. The crowds are multigenerational, relatively sober and generally tolerant of the inevitable chaos and crowding. What else would you expect when you cram 50,000 people each day into the Seattle Center, which every Labor Day weekend is chain-linked off from the rest of downtown to become its own little metropolis of music, comedy, film, literature, dance, theatre, poster art, crafts, ethnic food and good vibes. Even the street performers are uniquely classy, from the female mime dressed as an angel or pixie to the grade-school-age young lady who stands on a balance ball, spins three hula hoops and plays some hella bluegrass fiddle.
Keeping It Clean
So here we are — this warm Saturday sunshine, this cool Starbucks beverage (Seattle is the Evil Empire’s epicenter, after all. Pike’s Place Market is the only place you can still see the original topless mermaid.) This is the perfect combo for relaxing on some wooden bleachers, watching a float plane buzzing Seattle Memorial High School Stadium and listening to Crowded House. But what’s up with the mix? Even my abused ears can distinguish actual song lyrics — we’re talking verses, not just “hey now, hey now.” Sure, there are a lot of people up front by the stage, but there’s got to be at least an acre of exposed concrete in here.
A couple of hours later, Mark Carlson, owner of Carlson Audio, confirms my guess. “We have some of the beta UX8800 processors with Gunness Focusing,” he tells me after climbing down from the monitor sidefill rigging during a sound check. “We’ve been working with EAW, tweaking them a little.” The new DSP filters developed by EAW’s resident genius really make an audible difference in the main arrays: 12 KF760s over 4 short-throw KF761s each side, driven by QSC PowerLight 6.0s and 4.0s.
Still, the Samsung Mainstage at Bumbershoot is just a super-sized high school football stadium, with the extra-difficulty architectural feature of large concrete overhangs above those bleachers. (Bumbershoot, umbrella, rain, Seattle — is the picture coming together?) So, Carlson Audio has three KF750s per side for outfill, one on the deck for frontfill, and 12 SB1000s on each side for…well, probably for Wu-Tang Clan, Bumbershoot 2007’s closing act. But even the mighty Tang has to respect the speed limit. “We have a meter at FOH in here,” Mark tells me, “and computers on the other stages measuring one minute averaged LEQ.” Careful geographical planning, tight scheduling and strict adherence to the dB speed limits mean you can walk from stage to stage at Bumbershoot without having the electronica bleeding into the solo acoustic singer-songwriter. That’s not easy to do outdoors, even with the buildings that occupy much of the Seattle Center.
Formerly Full House
Mark Carlson worked his first Bumbershoot 16 years ago. “We did one stage that year, and it took all our gear,” he recalls. The festival still empties the Carlson Audio warehouse: The company is doing four stages this year, putting pretty much its entire inventory of KF750s, KF850s, JF260s and SM400s to work, along with all of its people. “For the staff, this is the big weekend,” Mark Carlson explains. “It’s a chance to get out of the shop and out to the festival. Our crews work the same stages every year, so everyone knows what to do. That’s Christina, our production manager, up on stage now — I have an all-woman stage crew on the main stage this year.”
The main stage sees 14 acts on this long weekend, and every one of them gets a sound check. The eSurance stage crew turns 18 acts in three days, with 30 to 45 minutes in between sets from 1:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. “There’s no sound checks on those stages,” Carlson points out. “It’s just ‘plug in and go.’”
As nine-year veterans of the Bumbershoot main stage, Carlson Audio knows to expect the unexpected. This year, the company provided a choice of desks for both FOH and monitor engineers. “We have a Midas XL4-44+4 and a Yamaha PM5DRH with v2.06 software at front of house, and another PM5D with a Midas Heritage 3000 44+4 for monitors,” he says. “Most people are pretty PM5D-savvy these days, but there are some who won’t give up those Midas preamps.” There’s a Klark-Teknik Helix EQ on FOH, and 12 channels of BSS 404 compressors along with eight channels of Drawmer DS201 gates available for the finicky guest engineer.
Carlson is also ready to handle special processor requests, with inserts for an Eventide Eclipse and Summit DCL200. They also keep a pair of Yamaha SPX990s, a T.C. Electronic 2290 and a Lexicon PCM90 on tap. It’s all about versatility — like their monitor amp racks. “We have Ashly Protea processors, so they can do anything we need,” Carlson says. “We have presets for SM400s, JF260s, even KF850s with special crossovers in them that we use for stage fill.” With 12 channels of Shure UR Series wireless and 10 sets of personal monitors on stage, there’s plenty to keep the monitor mixers busy.
Keeping It in the Community Up on the main stage, with sound check ending, Christine says, “Look out, it’s going to be mayhem up here in minutes,” says Christine. We head for the backstage trailers.
Later in the weekend, I had to check out Sam Yahel, the young New Yorker who has developed a distinctive post-modern jazz voice on the venerable Hammond B-3. The Wells Fargo Stage is on Bumbershoot’s mezzanine level, wedged in between a couple of buildings. The beer drinkers in the rear and the late-arriving overflow crowd appreciate the Ramsa and Martin delay speakers. They’re the property of Steve Midkiff and Audio Media, as is the Community P.A. up onstage. Steve has been working Bumbershoot since 1997. “I was doing Folk Live at the Seattle Center,” he recalls. “And Rick Lockard said ‘We can make this a Bumbershoot Stage.’ By now, they trust me to handle things up here pretty much on my own.”
Bumbershoot is a bit of a busman’s holiday for Steve, who is the king of black tie galas in Seattle. “Most of the year, I have one mic open at a time,” he says. “Of course, I got into this to do music, but the industrials and the galas are paying the bills.”
Audio Media is a Community dealer, and Steve was trying out his new TFL218 subs. Amp racks are Crest Pro, “the new lightweight stuff,” and QSC. All the different zones — subs, monitors, main stage 3-ways and three or four different delays — are direct from the Yamaha M7CL. “The feature set on this thing is amazing,” says Midkiff. “There are 16 outputs from every input, and if you add a card, you can have eight more, all with parametric EQ, compressor and delay.” Steve seems to really know how to get the most out of his tools, like using both compressors on an input to help out a speaker with clueless mic technique, or dialing in a little lowpass shelving to smooth out a vocalist’s rough edges.
While I was chatting with Steve about the history of his Bumbershoot gig (he used to run the “Wild Stage,” with all sorts of shenanigans), Sam Yahel strolled up to ask about the organ sound. Steve immediately put him at ease by introducing himself as “your sound man.” “I’m playing bass,” Yahel pointed out, and then offered that “60 Hertz on down is just garbage,” thereby establishing his audio literacy. “My sweet spot is usually around 80 to 100.” “You’ll get plenty of bass on stage,” his sound guy replied. “I usually look for that spot where it just starts to hang and then back it off a little.” Reassured, Sam went back on stage, kicked a few pedals and then said, “Well, it’s a little bit boomy right here, but it’s pretty good.”
Put It in a Binder
“This festival is just a huge spreadsheet,” Steve says. “It’s the same spreadsheet every year with different information.” Of course, like many spreadsheets (the ones that predict 15% growth into the infinite unforeseeable future, for instance) Bumbershoot’s sometimes fails to match up to reality. Schoolyard Heros substituted for +44, the Blue Scholars filled in for Ryan Shaw, the Horrorpops just plain failed to show, and Sam Yahel’s fellow New Yorkers Brian Blade and Joshua Redmond Jr. apparently got stuck on the East Coast. Not to worry, though. Local players Mark Taylor on alto and Matt Jorgensen on drums filled in, and the trio tore up a set of Sam Yahel compositions, standards and even “Norwegian Wood.”
“Actually it’s all these binders,” says Technical Director Rick Lockard, pointing to a shelf of the large three-ring variety. The production office at Bumbershoot is as quiet as the eye of the storm — tucked away on the third floor of the Center Theater (doing a festival in the midst of downtown has a few advantages, such as the availability of indoor plumbing). This is where Rick and his crew handle three labor contracts (with the city of Seattle, the Seattle Center and OneReel, the promoter), five sound companies and four staging suppliers. “We used to have a lot more,” says Lockard, who’s been running Bumbershoot since 1986, with a brief hiatus doing corporate events for Microsoft. “But we keep the same vendors year to year. All of the outdoor lighting is from Seattle Stage; the indoor venues at the Seattle Center have their own gear and crews. ProLine is a sponsor/donor for the projection equipment — these days, almost any kind of theatre or performance art has a video component.
For sound, we use Carlson Audio, Audio Media, Dan Sound, Point Source and TriAmp, which does all our backline. The staging is from the Seattle Center’s inventory, Seattle Stage and Lighting and Spectrum Production Services. We’ve all been tweaking things for a long time. By now, the guys have learned that if they turn the speakers 5 degrees in a certain direction, they won’t get complaints. Line array really helps with that.” Of the Seattle Center’s 76 acres, less than half is actually available for stages and audiences, the rest is “buildings, fountains, flowerbeds and roads we can’t block.”
Vendors like Carlson and TriAmp put their inventory at Bumbershoot’s disposal. “About three weeks before the festival, we tell TriAmp what backline pieces we will definitely not be using,” Lockard explains. “Everything else is on call for the whole weekend. Sometimes we can just drop an extra Twin Reverb on a stage, and that will take care of things for the whole day. But a lot of artists insist on using their own gear, so we run golf carts from the bus through the crowd to the stage.”
But it’s not the crowds or the temperamental performers that are Rick Lockard’s biggest challenge. “It’s the existing tenants of the Seattle Center,” he explains. “We don’t use Key Arena because of the Seattle Storm WBA franchise — between home games and practices, there’s just not enough availability in there.” Even when a venue is available for Bumbershoot, the timing can be very tight. “We don’t take possession of the parking lot in front of the Main Stage until midnight Friday,” Lockard points out, “and there will be a high school football game in there the Friday after Labor Day.” Just keeping the Astroturf in playable shape is a $50,000 annual expense for Bumbershoot.
Months of preparation, a week of setup, three days and nights of festivities, then another week of cleanup. And before you know it, it’s time to start revising all those binders for next year. But like the production vendors and thousands of attendees, Rick Lockard keeps coming back for more. “This is really a unique event,” he explains. “There’s something special about Bumbershoot — the diversity, the integration of all the arts from music to theater, dance, comedy, film and even literature. I tried to leave, but I just had to come back.”
