FEATURE PRODUCTION
put together the house band shared by most of the artists, “I don’t think we could
have had so many artists in the timespan if everyone had wanted to bring their own band – we just wouldn’t have had the time to do the turnaround line check necessary. To have the house band really made it all possible. “It was a very busy day.
Fifteen artists and during the turnaround between the acts there was a little bit of presentation that was being handled by Richard Anstead in the CTV truck that gave us a few minutes just to recall the snapshot and do a basic line check. “The guys from Adlib were absolutely spot-on and it was a really good collaboration between them, ourselves and CTV who provided a lot of the interface between all of us.” On show night, the final
act, Emeli Sandé has just finished her four-song set (the longest of the night) with a bang as confetti fills the air, drifting slowly onto the heads of those standing near the stage.
As the sold-out crowd
moves towards the exits and the clean-up crew readies for the start of their working day,
Summerhayes and his crew take a well-deserved five- minute break before starting
their own tear down. They’ve been here since nine in the morning and haven’t stopped.
PLANNING AND PREPARATION KEY TO STADIUM SETUP
While Red TX’s broadcast of Unity on BBC One reached millions just two days after the event, the sold-out crowd at London’s O2 arena required just as high of a standard from Marc Peers and the Adlib Audio crew who provided the sound reinforcement for the show.
For the main sound reinforcement at Unity, Adlib crew chief Marc Peers and his team opted for an L-Acoustics K1 system with V-DOSC side hangs complemented by flown K1 subs and ground stacked SB28 subs all run via Lake LM26 processors. At front of house were two 96- channel Avid Profile desks with two 96-channel Soundcraft Vi6s set up side stage. These controlled the monitor complement of Adlib MP4 wedges, flown L-Acoustics ARCS sidefills with SB28 subs and a 14- channel Sennheiser 2000
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series in-ear monitor system. “K1 is a proven performer at the O2,” comments Peers. “We’ve used this system many, many times there and it’s always worked out great. Console choices were based on attempting to spec what most of the visiting artists would prefer.” “At FOH Ian Nelson was manning the Profile that took care of the house band and it has to be said that the guest FOH engineers were very respectful of what he was trying to achieve by leaving him in control and acting in an advisory capacity,” continues Peers.
“At monitor world it was a bit different – we ran both Vi6s so they both saw all the inputs simultaneously. That way our babysitter Ben Booker could mix the house band’s monitors from his Vi6 and the second Vi6 would be available for the guest monitor engineers to take care of their artists, rather than have two monitor engineers scrapping over the same board!” Planning and preparation
were once again the order of the day and Sennheiser’s Mark Saunders and Andy Lillywhite were present for RF support.
Tim Summerhayes works the Studer Vista 8 in Red 1
“We suspended eight [mics] from the catwalk in the roof and another eight around the stage to get in close proximity of the atmosphere. The blend of the two made it sound just huge.” Tim Summerhayes
In a way, the concert’s title
aptly sums up the on-the-day experience for Summerhayes: “We’re all aware of what everyone’s doing, but everyone’s responsible for their own department and no one has to worry about the other guy and I like it that way. Everyone can then concentrate on their own job and know it will get done.” “Outside of our three-man
crew, we all know the people on the TV side and there’s a mutual respect – we know these people are at the top of their game and we know they’re going to do their job,” he continues. “You have to respect what they do. It was a hard day’s work but I came around feeling good. I don’t think we could’ve done a better job.”
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“We had to take control of
the RF management and planning for the show – it’s just not practical to supply everybody’s RF needs separately so there’s inevitably some element of frequency sharing,” says Peers. “We wanted to get in a position where we could at
least patch and check all the RF mics and in-ear monitors during the previous artist’s set so nobody went on stage ‘blind’. One seemingly small and perfectly reasonable request can literally throw all the planning back to square one so this was a bit of an epic too.”
November 2013 29
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