The Seven Peaks Festival, an annual music event curated by country music superstar Dierks Bentley pulled more than 12,000 into in the small mountain town of Buena Vista, Colorado, to enjoy three days of live music. Ensuring high-quality sound from wherever they stood in relation to the event’s three stages were PK Sound Trinity Line Arrays and Gravity Subwoofers.
Bentley’s relationship with the location began with last year’s recording of The Mountain, when he realsed that nearby Buena Vista would be the perfect place to host an outdoor festival and worked with Live Nation’s Brian O’Connell to put it together. ‘It’s a special place,’ says Bentley’s FOH and system engineer, James ‘Pugsley’ McDermott. ‘Dierks recorded the first music video for The Mountain on the same property, and we knew it’d be a great place to host a festival where people could camp out and enjoy the scenery.’
Comprising the Main Stage, which could support the full attendance of the event, the Whisky Road Stage which was fit for up to 5,000, and the Beach Stage for up to 3,000, the event needed systems that could operate effectively at altitude: ‘You need to make sure that the rig can stand up to the diminished air pressure since we’re operating at 8,000 feet above sea level,’ McDermott confirms. ‘You need drivers that can really push.’
In addition to the added power requirements, the systems also needed to ensure that the festival didn’t wear out its welcome with the surrounding community: ‘Some of these farms were less than 800 feet away,’ McDermott explains. ‘We needed to ensure that there’d be no uncontrolled noise pollution in there as well as spilling out into the neighbouring areas.’
McDermott used PK’s Trinity line arrays and Gravity speakers while running sound for Bentley’s eight month Burning Man Tour earlier this year. ‘These systems are very well put together, and adaptable to any venue and situation,’ he says. ‘PK did a great job designing these boxes and it’s made them really efficient to use and you know that what you put in, you’re going to get back out.’
The systems’ precision and ability to adjust ‘on the fly’ not only saved on set-up time at Seven Peaks, but allowed McDermott total control of the event: ‘With most systems you have to spend a lot of time with prediction software. It’s a great tool to have, but it’s never going to account for all the variables that can effect sound in a live environment,’ he says. ‘The control that you have with Trinity and Gravity allow you to really listen and make adjustments in the moment, which can be really powerful.’
McDermott employed 12 Trinity line arrays, and 12 Gravity subwoofers per side for the Main Stage, with 14 Trinity ten line arrays per side for coverage. The Whisky Road Stage had four Trinity arrays stacked on the stage, with three Gravity subs per side and the Beach Stage had two Trinity 10s stacked with two Gravity 2x18 subs for each side. This gave sufficient power for each stage with flexibility to suit the variety of artists that would be performing on each. Impressed by what his team was able to accomplish, McDermott said, ‘It always blows people away. In the grand scheme of things, the technological advancements in this stuff is really impressive, but at the end of the day it just sounds incredibly musical and all without too much DSP.’
‘The Trinity system was ultra-responsive and gave me better coverage and headroom than any other line array that I’ve used,’ says Trevor McIntosh, FOH engineer for Tracy Lawrence. ‘It inspired me to mix in a way that was more dynamic and impactful.’
‘It made for a real easy day,’ agrees Frank Sgambellone, FOH for Luke Bryan. ‘Pugsley had the system sounding brilliant when we arrived, and given that the site was asymmetrical, being able to steer the PA on the fly made sure that we had a great show.’
More: www.pksound.ca
