With a repertoire that includes arrangements of songs by Muse, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, as well as pieces from Mozart and Bach, all-female electric string quartet Urban Electra have established themselves as a staple of corporate entertainment, social events and festivals around the world. Their performances place each musician on a separate riser, in some cases as much as 100ft or more apart. As dramatic as this can be, it comes with the threat of wireless dropouts for their electric instruments – one that has now been overcome with CP Beam antennae and Combine4 active IEM transmitter combiners from RF Venue.
‘It can be challenging, like the time they performed for an Ameriprise Financial event with 3,500 guests at the Boston Convention Center, when each of their individual stages were literally 125ft apart from each other,’ says Jim May Productions CEO Jim May, who is also Urban Electra’s longstanding production and tour manager and wireless supervisor. ‘They can’t see each other that far apart, and they cannot keep the music together unless they’re able to hear themselves clearly and consistently through their in-ear monitors. Avoiding dropouts is critical.’
May has guided Urban Electra’s wireless journey throughout the RF spectrum’s bumpy road over the past two decades, as first the 700MHz and then the 600MHz bands were auctioned off by America’s FCC for use by mobile wireless providers, vastly narrowing the useful bandwidth windows for professional wireless users. He invested in new wireless systems as needed over that time, but the ever-smaller available spectrum made using wireless instruments and IEMs increasingly challenging. Incidents of interference and dropouts were occasional, but any audio artefact can ruin the moment for a musical performance.
May had had some experience with RF Venue’s products, such as the Diversity Fin antenna, but felt he needed more insight into how to use them. He was able to glean useful information from YouTube videos created by RF Venue Senior Applications Engineer Don Boomer, and subsequently contacted Boomer directly.
‘One thing Don taught me was not to wrap the cable in a circle less than a foot in diameter, because that can cause the copper wire to go out of round and it won’t transmit the signal properly,’ he says. ‘He also told me to group my IEMs together at the top of the frequency range and group transmitters together in the lower end of the band, so they were not conflicting.’
All of that advice made a massive difference, May reports. At a corporate event where the players were again positioned on separate risers, he followed Boomer’s suggestion to reduce the transmitter output to 50 per cent, deployed a CP Beam antenna on a 10ft-high stand, and for the first time used RF Venue’s RG8X coaxial cable.
‘Before the show, I played music over one channel of the wireless and took a bodypack and walked it through several rooms of the venue,’ he says. ‘I got close to 500ft away from the receiver and not a single dropout. That opened up a whole new world of wireless for us. Lowering the transmitter output and letting the CP Beam antenna do the hard work was a revelation. You can’t get that kind of reception with little paddles. We use ten channels of RF every night, and we haven’t had a dropout since.’
More: http://rfvenue.com
