The Hell music festival continued its long tradition of bringing the blues to Norway recently with its 19^th visit. PA rental company Sceneservice supplied all of the stage equipment for the festival’s international line-up of more than 20 bands and artists, which included performances from Texas’s Johnny Winter, Louisiana legend Henry Gray, and the British Blues Band alongside longtime bluesman and Hell Festival founder Jon Uthus, as well as a host of local perormers.

Reflecting its longstanding inclination towards blues music, the festival has been dubbed Blues in Hell for the four years Sceneservice has been taking care of the sound. The company chose a QSC KLA Series active line array system, along with K Series active loudspeakers, WideLine-8 Series line arrays, and a host of PowerLight 3 Series amplifiers for the festival’s two major live venues – the circular Magic Mirror tent erected in the middle of Hell, and the village’s 900-year old Værnes church, the oldest preserved stone building in the whole of Norway.

At Værnes church, Sceneservice used a new QSC KLA line array system, the first KLA system supplied in Scandinavia by local distributors EM Nordic. Sceneservice hung three QSC KLA12 line array cabinets and used a KW181 sub on each side of the building to serve the smaller, 400-strong audience.

‘Some of the best artists in the blues world perform in Hell every year, and they demand top-quality gear,’ says Jonas Nielsen of Sceneservice, who acted as FOH engineer at the Værnes church. ‘You could hear even the lowest whisper from local singer Siri Bones at the far back of the church with our brand-new KLA system. We’re looking forward to using it on a lot of different jobs in the future; so far, it’s definitely on top of our ”value for money” list,’

At the Magic Mirror tent, three WideLine-8 Series speaker arrays were hung on each side and gave wide-area coverage to the major part of the 1,500-strong audience, together with a pair of WL212 subwoofers, all powered by PowerLight Series amps. K Series K10 active loudspeakers acted as fill for listeners behind the stage and PowerLight 340 amps powered the stage monitors at both venues. The set-up was managed by a QSC SC28 system controller.

‘The QSC WideLines deliver crystal-clear sound, and an amazing low end from those small subs; we can’t think of any PA system on the market that would do the job better,’ adds Nielsen.