Pro Sound Web: This month, Coachella heralds the start of the American music festival season, showcasing a wide range of musical styles to fans and talent buyers from around the country.
Although Summerfest in Milwaukee and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival have had multiple stages over two weekends for decades, Coachella helped show the U.S. market 10 years ago that genre-spanning, multiday, multistage open-air festivals can be a success.
3 comments:
Doing the sound for a festival is not an easy task at all! The thing is designing sound system for a production or concert is that you look at the needs of this single event and then design accordingly for that event. What is so unique about a festival is that it is so many diverse performances that need to use one system. The system that you are designing needs to work for both ends of the spectrum, which can be really challenging for a designer. Another thing that is a big factor in sound design is what equipment is going to be used by the performers. With a festival there is an equally amount of diverse equipment that each band requires that is weirdly specific to them, so it is hard to account for this. If I learned anything by reading this article it is the importance of being flexible.
As someone who is particularly interested in festivals, this article was great. I think that the technology in festival is often so overlooked because it often does not change from artist to artist on stage. I absolutely agree with Jason that a great take away from this article is it is important to be flexible when working with sound in a festival situation. I think that the topic of sound systems and designs in festivals is actually pretty fascinating. What I wish this article elaborated on more is the subject of how sound personnel work for festivals. I recognize that the article is more so about the technology of sound in festivals, but I would like to learn more but the idea of how much does each band get when they arrive. For example, does a small band that opens early in the day have the access to the same material that the headlining act at the end of the night has?
I found it really interesting to see how sound is run at these festivals where there are many bands using the same space in a short period of time. I knew that in tours bands carry their own gear with them (typically), but in events like these there are a lot of grey areas. They didn’t really talk about it in the article, but I’m assuming that all of the speaker rigs are the same for the entire festival, and not even headliners bring in their own cabinets (unless they’re for effects like Leslie cabinets). What interested me the most though was the consoles, because a lot of the times they are stock and shared by different artists but sometimes artists use their own. The article wasn’t very specific on how the cables are run from the stage to the booth, and I still am unsure if the snakes are provided or brought by artists. These seem like the kinds of events that could benefit by having the venue run a couple of different cables that the artists could choose to plug into. Definitely a 48-channel snake, a couple of Ethernet lines and a couple of coaxial lines are probably enough to cover everyone. I think that the snake is the only necessary cable, but for digital consoles having the Ethernet and coaxial runs offer more flexibility. I’d be interested to work as over hire for an event like this, just to see how everything is run, butI'd be scared to engineer for a band. It seems like the engineers who tour with the bands, especially the ones that aren’t headlining, have incredibly stressful jobs during load in.
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