The chart-topping country sensation boasts the largest PA system on the road.
Rascal Flatts has been on fire for a couple of years and, according to Pollstar, the band’s 2007 tour ranked in the top 10 of the year. Rascal Flatts puts on a major show and to support it, Sound Image put together what they say is the largest PA system currently on the road in the U.S., featuring 90 JBL VerTec VT4889 full-size line array loudspeakers and 32 VT4880 arrayable subwoofers and two Studer Vista 5 SR digital consoles. Sound Image is also using dbx DriveRack 4800s for speaker management and Crown I-Tech 8000 amplifiers. For the first time on a major tour, all aspects of the system are controlled through a single interface  HiQnet System Architect.
Pairing Up the Consoles
It is common to see one model of console at FOH and something completely different in Monitor World, but there are advantages to the pair of Vista 5s that are out on this tour. “We can meter, we can see, we can manage everything and troubleshoot from one source,” said Jon Garber, long-time front-of-house engineer for Rascal Flatts. In addition, setting up and tearing down is very efficient and fast with the new console. “The Studer sounds great,” he said. “It’s very smooth and what comes in is what goes out. There’s no coloration.”
The Studer Vista 5 SRs digital desk converted Rascal Flatts’ Monitor Engineer Stuart Delk, who had resisted going digital. Prior to the Studer, Delk was using two analog desks weighing about 1,100 pounds each when in their cases. “My footprint took up one 10- by 22-foot area,” said Delk. “Now I’m at a third of that size. With the Studer, I have more outputs, more inputs and this one desk is doing what three other desks were doing: all my personal monitors, my sidefills, my flown sidefills, my subs on stage and the wedges out on the B stage.”
The FOH and monitors have completely different channel bus requirements so each system has its own stage box, which handles the mic pres and runs back to the console on fiber. FOH has 84 mono inputs and 20 stereo inputs. Within that there are eight stereo groups, 10 mono aux, 10 stereo aux, five mono matrix and five stereo matrix. The monitor console has a different channel bus structure. Delk has 84 mono inputs, 20 stereo, 20 stereo auxiliaries and 10 mono auxiliaries.
Naturally, each member of the band wants to hear something different in their mix — which means he wants to be louder than everyone else. Effects are also a personal taste thing  some guys like a lot of reverb, some guys don’t. “That’s why I’ve got one for every person on stage,” said Delk. “I have eight people on stage and nine reverb units. There is one extra for a guest. Brian McKnight has been known to sit in.”
The Venue of All Venues
Setup went smoothly for the tour’s second major show using the Studer console. “We got loaded into Madison Square Garden at 6 a.m. and everything just seemed to flow,” said Garber. “If you don’t have your stuff together when you come to a place like MSG, you can find yourself in trouble and costing the band lots of money in labor time.”
In addition to the personal monitors, Delk also installed JBL VerTec VT4889 sidefills for the singer. “It’s just the vocals as loud as possible in the sidefills that hang facing the stage,” said Delk. While the singer relies on his personal monitors to hear the lack of stage wash from the house speakers can be disconcerting. “These line array systems are very efficient,” said Delk. “All the sound goes toward the audience. Nothing resonates off the back of it. When we first switched to this VerTec PA, we didn’t have the sidefills and he was having a hard time hearing pitch. I got the sidefills going and he’s good to go now.” With guitar amps typically housed offstage and miked, Delk found a similar solution for the guitar player. There are wedges turned on when he’s playing a solo so he can get controlled feedback.
The tour winds up on Aug. 2 at the TWC Music Pavilion at Walnut Creek in Raleigh, N.C.
