Late June in Montreal, and the weather hasn't been cooperating for the Montreal Jazz Fest. It may be the world's largest Jazz Fest, but it's still an outdoor festival, with all the unpredictability that entails. Around 2 in the afternoon, after a morning of solid rain, the clouds parted long enough for Jess Gagnon, FOH mixer for Canadian trip-rock band Beast, to run sound check-but the plastic dome tent over FOH stayed up and the plastic tarp to cover the console stayed close at hand.
Still, acts are playing on some of the other five outdoor stages now, and the crew from Solotech is on hand to make sure that this evening, when all of the Fest's six outdoor stages and five indoor venues are busy, weather or not, the show will go on without a hitch.
In addition to their work with international touring acts like Celine Dion and Cirque du Soliel, Solotech is the Montreal-based production company charged with making sure the Jazz Fest sounds great, no matter what the weather is doing – a job Hugo Tardif and his crew take seriously. Tardif has been working the Fest for about 15 years now, first as a mixer for the Fest before taking over as the Fest's TD for a few years in the early 2000s.
"I started out as just a sound engineer on one of the outdoor stages," says Tardif. "And the longtime technical director who was there left. The position was open, and it just seemed like a good way to continue." Tardif was working as the TD for the Fest during 2004, their 25th season, when they made plans to turn this neighborhood in the downtown core of Montreal into the "Quartier de Spectacles."
"It's basically the downtown core turning into hundreds of venues, indoors and outdoors," explains Tardif. "The Jazz Fest has built spaces to be able to accommodate thousands of fans for outdoor shows." Having these new venues is great, but it's made the show much more of a logistical challenge. "For years, the festival had the same venues, at the same place-but it's been evolving a lot in the past two years. And so that's been the real technical difficulty-because each year, we're now dealing with different spaces to accommodate sound live, and so the sound systems have had to evolve."
For the outdoor venues, Tardif follows common sense when spec'ing out the systems.
"We obviously take the largest stages first and then go on to the smaller stages, and try to accommodate with the best quality equipment we can give them," says Tardif. "The main concern is coverage-you need to cover those venues as best as you can. But you've also got buildings all around so you need to choose the right type of boxes to not be bouncing around, the whole downtown core-because people do live there. You need to cover the venues as best as we can, but we need to limit the spills as much as you can as well."
For the Scène TD, the largest outdoor venue where the Fest's biggest headliners (The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Beast) played, Solotech needed to supply a system that could provide good coverage for up to 100,000 people spread down a long street and that wouldn't end up bouncing sound everywhere. He used a Meyer Milo line array with 11 cabinets on each side of the stage, coupled with 12 Meyer 700hp subs. Delay towers used four Meyer MSL6s and four Meyer MSL5p cabinets.
"We used a Milo array because it's very easy to control, thanks to the Galileo system. We need that control because the weather changes every day, and the crowd changes, and you need to be able to play around with the system. It's really the more flexible line array system that we have. So for us, that was a no-brainer-it needed to be Milo. We added the two sets of delay towers to be able to cover the end of the venue without having to kill everybody that's in front of stage."
Horizontal and Vertical
Not every venue required a line array, but every venue at the Fest was equipped with a Meyer rig. After many years of supporting the Fest through Solotech and Gerr Audio, Meyer became the official sound provider of the Fest this year. Tardif couldn't list every piece of Meyer gear he outfitted for the Fest, but estimated that they used more than 400 Meyer speaker cabinets and 250 Meyer monitors. To bolster Solotech's inventory for the Fest, Gerr Audio stepped up, making sure they had everything they needed.
"One of the many fantastic companies that Meyer has had the good fortune to be associated with is Solotech in Montreal," said Bob Snelgrove, president of Gerr Audio. "All of our demo inventory is here at the Jazz festival in support of Solotech."
One of the main demo units on display at the Fest was the new Meyer JM-1P. The JM-1P rides counter to the current stampede of line arrays and is designed to offer an alternative to venues where a line-array would not be the ideal solution. Meant to be more of a "re-launch" than an improvement, the JM-1P unapologetically champions the idea of a horizontal array. For the Fest, it was used outdoors at the Scène Loto Québec stage and indoors at the Maisonneuve venue, where Andrew Hope of Gerr Audio worked as system tech. Inside the Maisonneuve they used eight JM-1P's, four per side, to cover a 1,458-seat house. Each cabinet has a 60° vertical dispersion pattern and a 20° degree horizontal pattern. When rigged next to each other the horizontal field couples and can offer a throw that grows wider in 20° increments.
"If I was doing this room with any kind of line array component I'd probably need 11 or 12 components per side-which means three or four times as many devices in the room, all the interactions that go on between them plus which in order to make the line array work in here, it would have to be higher up and coming down which means you can't get directly into the balcony," says Hope, leading me on a tour of the space.
In the past, one of the problems with a horizontal array was the interference along the edges of the boxes where the audio coupled. Meyer is combating that with new horn technology, which means the horizontal audio field can be smooth across however many 20° increments you want.
"If we walk through this thing in the horizontal it's very, very difficult to detect any kind of interaction between the cabinets," says Hope.
Also, thanks to the construction of the cabinet and horn they can be run at full range, without the use of a high-pass filter, so the lower notes of acoustic instruments aren't lost in the cross-over filter. For the crowd at a Jazz Fest, who are used to listening with discerning ears, that can mean a lot.
"For one of the jazz acts early in the festival the mixer came in with his show setup on disk. He loaded it on the console, and I watched him throughout the sound check just turn off EQ filters and turn off EQ filters," says Hope. "Once he'd heard the acoustic bass, he turned around to me and just said, ‘Man, this is amazing, what are these things?'"
On Site
But all the venues and all the gear wouldn't mean a thing without a great staff, and Solotech knows what it takes to support a show, too. Tardif estimates they had approximately 35 people working to set up the show for a month before-hand and to supply 24-hour support on site throughout the run of the Fest. They also had a fully-stocked warehouse on site, so that if any last-minute requests from artists came through, they could walk the gear over in minutes without even having to call in an order to the shop.
"For the most part everything is planned for ahead of time-but for the part that's not planned well we have gear on site," says Tardif. "If something goes wrong, something breaks, our service department is available, we have technicians on site, we pretty much have it all covered."
David Vincent was head TD engineer on the Scène TD stage, but was also in charge of making sure that all the different smaller sound systems were well fit and running smoothly.
"Vincent was a big help this year because he was involved from the beginning and on site as soon as the first box is installed," says Tardif. "And as soon as there was a problem or whatever – anything needed attention, David was there."
But Tardif can't emphasize enough just how much of a team effort the whole production was-not just from his staff, but with Meyer and Gerr as well.
"Gerr Audio and the guys at Meyer, they made it really easy for us, providing exactly what we needed for the different venues," says Tardif.
And even the weather got into the team concept, too. Shortly after sound check, the rain stopped, so Solotech, Gerr Audio and Meyer could provide great sound to a large, dry, crowd.
Place des Festivals – Scène TD (Main Stage)
Mains:
22 Meyer Sound Milo
12 Meyer 700-HP subs
4 Meyer CQ-2
Delay towers:
4 Meyer MSL-6
4 Meyer MSL-5P
Monitors:
14 Meyer UM-1
4 Meyer USM-1
Mixers:
Yamaha PM5D (FOH and Mon)
Meyer Galileo 616 with SIM system
Scène Rio Tinto Alcan – 2nd Main stage
Mains:
24 Meyer Sound Mica
8 Meyer 700-HP subs
4 Meyer CQ-2
Monitors:
14 Meyer UM-1
4 Meyer USM-1
Place des Arts TheÌatre Maisonneuve:
8 Meyer Sound JM-1P
4 Meyer 700-HP subs
12 EAW SM200 stage monitors
Yamaha PM5D-RH (FOH)
Yamaha M7CL-48 (Mon)
Meyer Galileo 616 with SIM system
Place Des Arts Salle Wilfrid Pelletier:
24 Meyer Sound Mica
8 Meyer 700-HP subs
2 Meyer CQ-1 (front fill)
2 Meyer UPA-2P (front fill)
4 Meyer M1D (stage lip fills)
Yamaha PM5D (FOH and Mon)
Meyer Galileo 616 with SIM system
Scène Loto Quebec
Mains:
8 Meyer Sound JM-1P
4 Meyer 700-HP subs
Meyer Galileo 616
Monitors:
JBL 115 and 215 (all stage monitors)
Mixers:
Midas XL 200 (FOH); Soundcraft SM24
(MON)
Processing:
FOH: TC Electronic M3000
Yamaha SPX 990, REV500
BSS DPR-402, -404 and -504
MON: FX Rack and Klark Teknik EQs
*Partial List; these were among the larger venues; there were 14 venues in all.
