The Blossom Music Festival runs annually at the Blossom Music Center, the summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra, with this year’s show bringing in a new mixing system for the audience on the venue’s lawn area. Where previously engineers had some measure of remote control of the installed speakers covering the lawn from a Wi-Fi tablet, a Solid State Logic Live Remote Tile and Solsa (SSL On/Off Line Setup Application) software and SSL Live L200 console took this to new levels.
‘It was fraught with a lot of problems, the least of which was Wi-Fi,’ says Blossom Music Center IATSE Audio Department Head at FOH engineer of more than 35 years’ touring experience, Bill Fertig. ‘It’s not a very good mix environment, either – on an iPad, when you’re pushing a fader you can’t work on the EQ, unless you allocate the whole display to the EQ, and then you’re not pushing the fader. You could use a bigger display, but it’s not the ideal situation.’
When The Cleveland Orchestra partnered with a new production management team two years ago, Fertig suggested installing an SSL Live L200 in the recording studio below the 6,000-seat Blossom Pavilion amphitheatre. Such a set-up would enable an engineer to mix for the lawn audience using a physical console surface – the 12-fader Remote Tile, which is identical in operation to the tiles in the console – instead of a tablet. It would also provide an interface to the Merging Technologies multitrack recording system that The Cleveland Orchestra’s recording engineer, Gintas Norvila, uses at Severance Hall, the organisation’s year-round home.
Fertig has spent some time researching the best choice of console. ‘SSL is really championing network audio,’ he says – which was important, as he needed to interface to the Dante network cards in Yamaha amplifiers driving a Nexo line arrays covering the lawn, and also needed a to connecti the L200 and a Merging DAW in the studio.
‘We have a pair of Yamaha switches in the amp room and, with some VLANs, we take that control to the top of the pavilion where there’s an amp rack that services some newly installed subwoofers on the lawn.’
From there, on show days, the Blossom audio crew pull a network line and a power cable onto the lawn and plug in the Fader Tile and a stand-mounted Microsoft Surface tablet running Solsa software, providing the mix engineer with complete real-time control of the remote L200 console. Fertig hopes to eventually run some permanent underground Cat 6 and power lines to the lawn mix position.
The simple, portable lawn mix set-up is also a necessity in the region’s changeable weather. ‘You just pull the power and network cables, lift up the Tile, grab the computer and walk everything out of the rain,’ Fertig says. ‘The audio is still working and the guy in the studio is now in control of the mix.’ In the studio, the L200 console connects to the DAW via Madi and is also used to generate a stereo mix of each concert for the archive.
Having a second operator working in parallel in the studio also has advantages. ‘In the past, if you were mixing out on the lawn, you couldn’t solo-in-place. But you have that advantage in the studio,’ Fertig explains. ‘It translates to a well-tuned mix, having two people working on it, one who can listen and solo instruments while simultaneously the other person is sitting on the lawn in front of the speakers and pushing the faders.’
Blossom Music Festival typically welcomes more than 400,000 visitors during its summer season. This year’s programme featured The Cleveland Orchestra presenting a broad repertoire, from classical works by Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Elgar and Dvořák, to the Great American Songbook and Stewart Copeland’s Police Deranged for Orchestra. Live Nation also offers a series of shows from across a wide range of rock, country and other genres at Blossom Music Center, south of Cleveland, under a long-term contract with The Cleveland Orchestra.
Having used the SSL L200 console set-up for a season, Fertig believes it could also solve problems at other venues: ‘I don’t know if there is anybody else doing this, but it seems like the Tile and Solsa technologies lend themselves to a few other applications.’
Indeed, he and the orchestra’s recording engineer have discussed remote mixing over an even greater distance. ‘He lives in New York, so we’ve talked around the scenario of him not having to come here for some things. There are a lot of cool things that could be done.’
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