Thousands of San Francisco Bay Area locals spent the last weekend in August at Golden Gate Park relaxing on a bench beside Spreckels Lake, playing golf at the Golden Gate Municipal Golf Course or visiting the Steinhart Aquarium. Thousands more strolled through the gates at the second Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival to see any of the 68 or so musical acts that played throughout the weekend. Then, of course, there were the hundreds of engineers and techs who made sure that those concertgoers and musicians could hear everything that was happening on stage. Many of those sound pros came from Sound on Stage, one of the Bay Area’s busiest sound companies. SOS also provided enough gear to cover six locations at the Park.
Sound on Stage has a history of working at Golden Gate Park dating back to the company’s early days, reports general manager George Edwards. “Our first show in the park was in 1972,” he says. “It was The Coalition Against the War show.” More recently, SOS has handled productions as varied as the Now & Zen show put on by a local radio show, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and the San Francisco AIDS Walk.
At this year’s Outside Lands Festival, SOS handled the Twin Peaks, Sutro and Presidio stages as well as the Toyota Free Yr Radio Space booth, Garnier Fructis Rock Your Style tent and the Winehaven tent, which featured dozens of California’s top winemakers.
Like many festivals around the globe, Outside Lands features an impressive array of talent. While that’s a thrill for attendees, it’s a bit of a headache when it comes to PA logistics. “We do our best to find common needs from the bands on each stage to find a console or consoles that work for everybody,” Edwards reports. “The speaker systems are assigned based upon what the venue really needs and the type of acts determine whether or not you’ve got front fills and the ratio of full range boxes to subs.”
SOS boxes of choice come from L-Acoustics (see sidebar for the list of gear used on each SOS stage), and when Edwards is figuring out what boxes goes to what stage, he has a straight-ahead philosophy. “We always try to over-PA everything,” he explains. “The reason is that we’d rather have the PA have some breathing room, and we want it to cover better than expected. We start with manufacturer recommendations, obviously, and then we change it up based upon the reality of what the stage is doing.”
And while the amount of boxes at Outside Lands was impressive, Edwards is quick to point out that the company did not have to sub-rent. “As a matter of fact, we had more at the shop if we needed them,” he says. “We were in a position to do anything they threw at us.”
The same could be said for the SOS-supplied FOH and monitor engineers, a group that includes former touring engineers who have made their home in the Bay Area after getting off the road. Manu Goodwin, who has toured with such acts as Ben Harper, worked at the Presidio Stage, where bands like Tea Leaf Green, JJ Grey & Mofro and Calexico played.
“I had the mellowest of all the stages,” he says with a laugh. “There weren’t any super-loud bands, and we had a couple thousand people maximum at our stage. Also, a lot of the other sites were pretty wide open, but this one was kind of closed off with trees on each side. It was a nice little bowl and had a nice feeling there.”
Engineers had a chance to customize the rig at their stage. Goodwin’s change was to run AES to his crossovers and have them live on stage. “Most of us had digital consoles, and I tend to try to stay in the digital realm, as much as possible,” he says. “So, I’ll keep the crossovers on stage and run AES out of the console straight into the crossovers.”
Not only does that give him a cleaner sound, it also gives him a little more control. “I control the crossovers via AudioCore RS232 on my computer at front of house, and I can do whatever I want with them. I can adjust any levels and there’s a gain difference. When you run copper back 200 or 300 feet, you’re losing gain. With this, you’re not.”
What made this gig a bit easier, says Goodwin, was the SOS festival setup that includes a 48-channel splitter. “So, I can grab any input from anywhere on stage,” he says. “Their stage boxes are 1 through 48, which is the size of a snake and you don’t ever have to scramble patch. The drum box is 48 inputs, the downstage box is 48 inputs, the side stage box is 48 inputs, so you’re not trying to scramble patch at the split, and you have access to all inputs everywhere. That’s really quick. The monitor amp racks, are great, too. You can grab any mix off that amp rack — they have a 15-pair panel that coincides with the 15 outputs of the console and you can grab any output of the console and make it a mix on stage.”
Where Goodwin had the mellow stage, fellow FOH mixer Dennis Deem had, um, the hard one. The Twin Peaks stage on Saturday, where he spent the weekend, included such acts as Street Sweeper Social Club, Mastodon and The Mars Volta. Friday and Sunday, though, was a bit less heavy and more pop-y with acts like Ween and Thievery Corporation. “The challenge,” Deem says, “was keeping the volume down throughout the weekend. There was a 101 dB limit at front of house on us (that limit was actually on every stage, including the main one) and those young guys like to give it the gas.”
Where most of the other SOS supplied stages featured digital boards, Deem’s had both an analog and digital at FOH. “Originally, the analog board was just for Ween (the Sunday headliner at Twin Peaks), because their FOH guy is an analog hold-out, but we ended up using it every day because somebody would see it and say, ‘Oh, I want to use that.’ It didn’t matter to me, we just had to swap a couple of things from the stage.”
One of the things that makes Outside Lands unique, from the sound pros perspective, anyway, is that there is a generous amounts of time between sets, so any kind of changeover can take place with an easy pace. “We had four or five bands a day with 45 minutes to an hour between,” Deem says. “So we could take a break and then go back to do a line check. If I had five to ten minutes to change the set, I would have been hard pressed to patch up an analog board for somebody.”
Another one of the unique factors is that it takes place in San Francisco, where the weather can change on a dime. In fact, Friday was one of the hottest days of the year in the city. Saturday and Sunday were two of the windiest. Of course, that’s a tricky situation at an outdoor event. “Sound is going to swish around no matter what you do,” Deem says. “You could probably get away with pumping the volume, but the wind is so inconsistent and it could suddenly stop. Really, there’s just no working with that part of nature, you just have to do your best and wait.”
Judging from fan reaction and reviews, the crew and bands pulled off their best to win the affection of all. For SOS it was another San Francisco outdoor festival — they’ve got a handful coming up including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and the Treasure Island Music Festival — with a satisfied producer and neighborhood.
