With the Stereophonics’ planned We’ll Keep A Welcome Christmas show at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium rescheduled to June, the luxury of pre-production time that had accompanied the original show evaporated. ‘The kit was already prepped and ready to go out, when the show was suddenly cancelled,’ says Solotech Senior Technical Advisor, Robin Conway.
Initially, using 23 Martin Audio PA hangs to cover both an A Stage and 40m thrust to a B Stage was entirely achievable. But the B Stage now needed to function as a totally independent stage, with its own PA (rather than as a delay stage). On top of which, Friday’s planned production/build-up day disappeared when the following night’s concert (which also featured Tom Jones) sold out, resulting in a second date being added on the Friday.
The support line-up also changed at the last minute with Newport-based Feeder coming in, while back at London HQ the crew worked around the clock to deprep inventory returning to base from other festivals (in what has become a frantic summer season for all PA companies as the event industry strives to recover), before reprepping and trucking it down to Wales.
The crowd of 74,000-plus who filled the stadium under its closed roof were oblivious to this fury of activity, and revelled in the kind of first-class, evenly balanced coverage for which Solotech, Capital Sound and Martin Audio are renowned. There was no compromise to the sound despite the production company needing to make a late provision for the incoming film crew, necessitating them to provide a separate broadcast feed in addition to the sound in the bowl.
Thus there was plenty to occupy the minds of the band’s long-serving sound engineer Dave Roden, Crew Chief, Tim Patterson, and system tech Mark Cleator, working alongside production manager Dave Nelson. Not least of these was how to create 360° of coverage via the B Stage system, with two hangs facing back towards the main stage, requiring the audience to turn around to see when the band performed there.
The main PA hangs from the A Stage comprised 18 MLA and one MLD (Downfill) enclosure per side. Behind them were two hangs of seven MLX subs in end-fire configuration, with side hangs consisting of 16 MLA per side. Front fill comprised eight XD12 and 16 WPS (set in pairs on a shelf across the front of the stage).
For the B Stage Capital Sound turned to its new Wavefront Precision. These hangs comprised 12 SXHF218 in a single column, with 36 flown WPL – 18 on either side of the subs – while outflanking these were two further hangs of 14 WPL and two hangs of WPC facing the main stage to complete the 360° coverage. The Wavefront Precisions were driven in two-box resolution from 24 iKon iK42 multichannel amplifiers in a flown amplifier cart directly over the B Stage.
The ring delay system, meanwhile, comprised eight hangs of eight MLA Compact. ‘Without the luxury of time, we used a Dante-enabled Soundweb Blu-806 to create a custom-delayed matrix.’ Robin Conway explains. ‘Any part of the PA system applicable to A or B stages had different delay taps – for instance, the ring system had two different times programmed as the action shifted from A to B stages.’
These delay taps allowed the FOH team to choose the entire system focus dependent on which, or how many, band members were performing on which stage at any given time.
‘Overall, we got the result we wanted in the face of enormous challenges, and probably broke some kind of internal record,’ Conway says. ‘I doubt, in our history, we’ve fielded 23 separate hangs of PA for a one-off gig before.’
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