ATLANTA – Rapper Lil Baby turned 30 earlier this month. For the fifth year in a row, he celebrated with a big Birthday Bash concert party in Atlanta. And for the fourth consecutive year, Spider Ranch Productions supported the event’s audio needs.
This year’s event, held on Dec. 7 (a few days after Lil Baby’s Dec. 3 birthday), was once again completely sold out, filling State Farm Arena, which can accommodate up to 21,000 people for concert events.
This year, Spider Ranch Productions deployed a Meyer Sound Panther system that included (100) Panther loudspeakers along with (18) 2100-LFC, (18) 1100-LFC and (10) Ultra-X40 enclosures.
The custom stage took the form of a submarine surfacing from the depths as Lil Baby and friends performed on the top, with open sightlines from all the seats in the arena, which serves as the home for the Atlanta Hawks NBA basketball team.
“The main challenges for this show were the tight timeline and quick turnaround,” said Josh Fehrmann, who served as system engineer for this event. “There were many moving parts, requiring our audio team to be flexible and adjust on the fly. The Spider Ranch team did an amazing job being adaptable and quickly loading in the show without any issues.”
Along with the timeline, another challenge was to optimize sound for an in-the-round performance within a somewhat asymmetric arena. “We did not have accurate drawings of the vertical section and transverse layout of the space,” Fehrmann noted. “However, the accuracy of MAPP 3D, along with the excellent off-axis response of the Panther system, allowed us to pre-optimize the setup and achieve wonderful coverage around the entire arena.”
Fehrmann added that the quick drawing tools within the latest release of MAPP 3D helped speed up the workflow. “It allowed us to accurately hang and optimize the system before we even flew the P.A. Our predictions were within 1 dB and 1 ms of reality.”
“Having been in this arena many times with various sound systems and artists I can definitely say the panther rig is best sounding system I have heard deployed in here,” said Spider Ranch head of audio Travis Strain, who was on hand to assist with the FOH setup, which included a DiGiCo Quantum 338 console. Strain called the imaging and clarity of the Panther enclosures “second to none. Meyer has figured out how to get the Hi-Fi sound of a high-end studio monitor into a line array box without sounding like they used a bunch of DSP to do so.”
The setup at monitors position, with an assist from Reilly Williamson, included a DiGiCo SD7 console. Other audio crew members included Duane Klose, Evan Alexander, Alan Hart, Robert Neilsen, Mike Norfleet, Mark Edwards, Brian Sarlan and Austin Hart.
