PILTON, U.K. – RG Jones Sound Engineering provided Glastonbury Festival's Pyramid Stage audio production for the third year in a row. (The company first worked there in 2007 as suppliers of FOH and monitor control systems.)
RG Jones, based in south London, is the U.K. member of the Synco Europe Network and was lead contractor for the audio production.
On the busiest weekend of the European festival calendar, with over a million watts of Synco by Martin Audio line array hardware deployed by Synco Network members at festival stages across northern Europe, RG Jones brought in London neighbors Capital Sound to supply the left and right PA hangs and co-designed a cardioid sub-bass array with a Martin Audio team headed by Jason Baird.
RG Jones audio production manager and FOH engineer Steve Carr ran the crew on-site, with his "wingman" Damion Dyer and system tech Mark Edwards, assisted by Richard Wonnacott. The stage crew was headed by Mark Isbister working alongside Alastair Viles, George Hogan, Steve Watson, Matt Sussex and Laura Yensen.
A total of 64 Martin Audio W8L Longbow cabinets were flown in 16-deep dual inner and outer main PA hangs per side, with a further 64 W8LCs flown in four delay positions, all timed using SMAART. Loudspeaker control was achieved via a rack of five XTA DP448 digital controllers, with Klark Teknik DN360 for engineers' "grab" EQ. The setup was very similar in configuration to last year – only a few cabinet angles were changed slightly to improve coverage and control.
The sub-bass array has been refined over the past two years in conjunction with noise monitoring specialists RPS Planning & Development to satisfy the requirements of optimizing audience enjoyment while containing the sound in the Pyramid Stage arena, which holds up to around 100,000 people and is just 1,100 meters from the village of Pilton.
The crew configured 54 Martin Audio WS218X subwoofers, powered by Crown Macrotech 12000s, in a cardioid array, with its output electronically curved to cover the width of the field. This allowed for ample sub volumes and even coverage to 120 meters out in the arena.
Jason Baird, Martin Audio's R&D director, has been involved with the Pyramid Stage system design since 2008 and noted that "this year's design picks the best aspects of 2008 and 2009 to make 2010.
"The cardioid sub array is doing two things," Baird added – "the main one being the broadside array: by delaying the subs incrementally from the center outwards, you can bend the overall wavefront, so it's actually tuned to fit the shape of the Pyramid Stage field. And then a third of the subs face backwards in a cardioid configuration to kill the broadside array's output on the stage itself."
As in previous years, the crew achieved the noise containment partly by driving the upper four boxes in each of the four arrays from its own controller, which can then be turned down independently of the rest of the array should any problems noise spillage offsite arise, minimizing impact on crowd sound levels.
"We can make fine adjustments which have barely any effect on the sound in the field, but it achieves the stated objective of reducing levels off site," Baird said. "That's the reason the same system's been used three years on the run, because of the great success in keeping both the crowd and the residents happy. It's a real pleasure to work with the RG Jones team, and the Capital Sound guys too."
In 2008, most visiting engineers were looking for an all-digital mix solution. In 2009, the vote swung back for mostly analog. In 2010, both technologies were deployed.
"We were pretty full out front," said Carr. "We had our ‘house' desk system of two Midas XL4s and two Digidesign Profiles and a PM5D – plus Shakira's team brought in a PM5000, while Muse had their own Midas XL4 with seven racks of outboard kit, all of which was put to very good use."
Two Midas XL88s were matrixed between the desks and the XTA drive rack. "It's a classic piece of kit," said Carr, "and for what we were doing, it's still unbeatable. Everyone was very happy with the sound quality, and we were able to interface all those desks with our system, using the bus inputs on the XL4s and the flexibility of the XL88s. This provided a really clean, direct, analog signal path between the visiting engineers' desk outputs and our system inputs – and the improvement this strategy made to the sound quality was clear.
"On the day, we just had to focus on the routing for each engineer's desk, and it went seamlessly without any hiccups, the result of intensive pre-production planning," Carr added.
On stage, Synco dual concentric 15" wedge monitors formed the ‘house' stage monitor system, supplemented with L-Acoustics ARCS sidefills and Synco STS drum fill. The RG Jones stage and FOH patch setup, which includes the team's stage-to-FOH ‘shout' (talkback) system based on a Yamaha LS9, was configured to accommodate headline bands' own touring desks and racks where required.
Steve Watson and George Hogan were in charge of monitors. Watson reiterates that ‘analog all the way' was the preferred solution, and that, this year, sidefills were flown, an improvement both sonically and in terms of sightlines. He added: "The great thing about that stage is that by 11am the sun has already gone over, so it was quite comfortable for us even while everyone else was sweltering."
Stage sound was fully analog and featured a pair of Midas Heritage 3000 desks as the ‘house' system, providing a total of 24 mixes, running on an A/B flip-flop basis. Their outputs were routed into an XTA drive rack, and once more accompanied by KT DN360 outboard graphics inserted over the groups for engineers to grab.
Sennheiser in-ear monitoring systems were available, as were a large selection of microphones, including AKG414s and 460s, and Shure SM57, SM58 and SM98s, with Neumann KMS 105s for specific vocal duties, "and a beyerdynamic M88 for Seasick Steve's stompbox," said Carr.
He added: "Quite a few acts brought their own mics and line packages and various bands brought their own boards, a reflection of the high profile acts who are doing multiple festivals this summer with their own control. With a well-developed plug and play system, we can accommodate their requirements without any hassle."
Mark Isbister (who also handled pre-production for the team) and Ali Viles coordinated each band's load-in and patching. Said Isbister: "With so many bands bringing their own desks and other kit, it's like a complex plumbing job, dealing with power, multicores, splits to the BBC broadcast team and so on. We had the best, smoothest-ever stage production in the four years that we've done it, and the weather made it easy for everyone to get on with their job instead of worrying about conditions and welfare."
For more information, please visit www.rgjones.co.uk.
