The Swiss city of Basel’s celebration of 15 years as host of the Basel Military Tattoo recently coincided with the 15th year that sound designer Tom Strebel chose TiMax spatialisation for sonic imaging and musical timing of the 7,000-capacity arena-scale production.
Inspired by the UK’s Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo – which also makes extensive use of TiMax – the 2022 Basel event featured the Welsh Guards, Swiss Army, Norwegian Guards, USAF drill team, Indian Kumudini Band, the Red Hot Chilli Pipers and Edinburgh favourites, the Basel Top Secret Drum Corps, plus a herd of dairy cows from the Swiss highlands as special guests.
Strebel’s crack team of technicians and engineers from audiopool again handled the complex wireless systems, mic, IEM and backline changeovers, along with FOH TiMax mix plus monitoring and show recordings done via a separate DiGiCo console in a backstage studio. The multichannel audio system driven by the TiMax SoundHub spatial processor comprised 30-plus distributed Clair Bros speaker cabinets and subs with LabGruppen amplification, all supplied this year for the first time by AudioRentClairAG. As in previous years, Dave Haydon, from TiMax UK developer OutBoard was on-site for rehearsals to support system setup and spatial Cue programming for audiopool’s engineers.
Group outputs from the FOH DiGiCo SD7 console fed radio mics to TiMax via Madi, then individual TiMax outputs fed each loudspeaker channel, including 11 distributed subbass cabs under the audience seating. TiMax Image Definition objects provided multiple timings between input sources and speakers onto 28 zones across the arena, including a couple of upstage and mid-stage immersive stereo playback and Bricasti reverb images. Haydon and audiopool programmed a series of TiMax Cues to follow the multiple static or marching band microphones, by placing or drawing timed trajectories for the input objects onto TiMax PanSpace.
‘Despite the forced hiatus of the past couple of years, the performers and crew pretty much picked up from where it had been refined to over previous years, including a number of necessary “cheats”, such as re-locating entire house-band and choir segments into the arena centre to maintain musical timing for certain set pieces and the finalé,’ Haydon says. ‘As always, we’re very proud to be involved, and it was great to see the show get a three-minute standing ovation at the premiere’
More: www.outboard.co.uk
