Posts Tagged ‘Katherine Jenkins’

Catch up Pt1 – The War of the Worlds and Katherine Jenkins

Sunday, August 21st, 2011

What a whirlwind the last couple of months have been here we are Mid August 2011 here’s the first of a couple of posts about projects that I have been involved with since October 2010,

The Autumn drew to a close with some fantastic shows with Christophe Willem and the team, I had to leave the last few dates of the tour to Mr Tim Speight as Production Audio Solutions was about to have the busiest time in it’s short history to date, we had Katherine Jenkins about to head out on tour to Germany, Australia, New Zealand and America, the spec was our full playback solution in a air freight friendly package. The result was a three way balancing act between flexibility, redundancy and size. The end product was a huge success with Alex heading out on those long hall flights he so loves to look after it all, i’m pleased to say from our end it all went without a glitch, and that was with late load-in’s tight connecting flights and all that Jazz.

While Alex was off around the world again I had a small corporate job with Delta Sound to do a London’s Excell Centre my main responsibility being flying the PA to facilitate the various different space combinations. Straight off the bounce of this I was in to the garage to put the finishing touches to the playback package for Jeff Wayne’s musical version of the War of the Worlds, Alive on Stage. As you’ll know I have been involved in this project since the first tour in 2006, this time round Production Audio Solutions were chosen to supply the redundant 48 track playback system based around Fostex D2424LV’s. Along side this in a major upgrade to the communication solutions used on previous tours we implemented a Riedel Artist Matrix the intension here was to join all the departments discreet comms systems together in order to allow improved cross department communication and remove the necessity for people to carry a maybe a couple of Motorola’s, a duplex comms pack and perhaps a set of IEM’s, which was my experience on the last tour. The Riedel system I designed integrated the Production Motorola’s, LX, Video and Stage commms along with links to the monitor desk allowing the Stage manager to talk directly to the guest artist with out them having to take their IEM’s (In Ear Monitors) out. Although we had a few interesting moments in rehearsals finessing how the system was to operate the net result was a great success

With Alex off with Katherine Jenkins I turned to my good friend PJ (Paul Johnson) to look after the String section and help with this comms package, this all worked out fantastically and was a great improvement on how the show had operated on previous tours. I look forward to the next tour of The War of the Worlds whenever that may be….

To Mr Simon Honywill thank you for the rouse we managed to have with the wheel from your incredibly expensive mixing chair.

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October Already

Friday, October 8th, 2010

So it’s mid October nearly where did the last six months go?

After completing the Katherine Jenkins tour I was off to LIPA for what has now become my annual appearance with the final year Advanced Live Sound Module, where I discus various methods of show control and the current range of digital multicore systems.  It was only a brief two day trip this year but it was long enough for me to catch up with some old friends over a curry.

Grumpy Old Women – West End

Next stop was another project for Stage Sound Services, Grumpy Old Women 2 transferring into the Novello West End, Sound Design by Nick Manning. A fairly straight forward fit-up thanks to it having been on tour.

Christophe Willem – Coffee Tour

Now was time for a well earned holiday with the in-laws at their place in France best part of a nice two week break, apart from having to fly on Ryian air.  It is such a crime that they have managed to price proper carriers out of the market on a lot of routes.  So it was towards the end of this break that I got an email from a rather flustered Miss Sarah deCourcy along with Steve Anderson on the Christophe Willem Coffee Tour, in short things not going quite as they should I was asked to come in as Keys and Play Back tech starting as soon as possible.  So Volcanic Ash cloud letting us through we returned to the UK and I headed straight back out to France.

I arrived in Montpellier and discovered the reasons for the short comings.  See Separate post.

Production Audio Solutions

One of the main reasons for my absence of blog posts has been the amount of time I have devoted of late to getting Production Audio Solutions up and running a joint venture between Alex Bryson and my self.

I’ve also done other posts on Ghost Stories at the Duke of Yorks, Carmen at the O2, BBC Question Time at Dance East

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Katherine Jenkins UK Believe Tour

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Now I’ve not previously been a big fan of the opera it’s never done anything to excite me but this show Kathrine Jenkins Show is Brilliant! Kathiene is such a talant and the band are fantastic, but what do you expect from such a group of pro’s.  I’m here looking after PlayBack, Keyboards and Wireless Comms and Motorolas.

This the first project Production Audio Solutions has supplied hardware for the Playback system comprises of two Mackie SDR’s with the control coming from G-type, along with the tried and tested green button on the MD’s keyboard.  For the production period I had the use of Mr Ali Viles ProTools HD Accel system to run the Logic and ProTools session from, there were a lot of changes happening all the time constantly adding or moving bits around the place it was great not to be waiting for the old progress bar for a change.  I think at one point I had the band rehearsing off the Mackie’s editing some overdubs on the ProTools system and making some sound effects on my laptop, it was great to be so busy I got such a kick out of it all.  One thing to remember though, you can’t play stereo interleaved files out of Digidesign hardware, so it’s less than ideal for Logic.

As mentioned in addition to my previous responsibilitys on similar tours Production Audio Solutions supplied the motorolas for back to back comunication during the day and tied into the comms on a half duplex channel for the show.  To compliment this there are 4 sets of Riedel’s Actobat digital full duplex dual channel wireless comms for the stage carpenters again this was all linked togerther and tied to the PRG provided ClearCom system.  Every one is able to talk to whom ever the need when ever the want, brilliant.  I’ve had really great feed back from the team regarding the equipment Producion Audio Soloutions have provided so I hope we will be doing the same again soon.

The team on this have been really great, it’s a few faces from old and a few new ones, we’ve been really lucky as we’ve been two shows on and one show off repeated for three weeks, so we’ve had some good R&R between shows.  The tour has only been on the road 3 weeks it’s been a bit shorter than average, but who know hopefully it will rear its head again soon.

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So where have I been since taking my dancing shoes off at the Nolans

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Aside from being a bit too busy and occupied and then tiared to put updates on here. I left the Nolans tour early in the capable hands of Mr Nic Gray as I had to go off and PE the We Will Rock You move from Bristol to Edinburgh. This went fairly well I do like the Edinburgh Play House. The Fitup from our point of view went well even if our truck did turn up considerably later than advertised. I had to make a return trip as Brian and Roger were to play the Edinburgh Press Night.

After a thankfully dry Saturday at Norwich’s Earlham Park doing the PA for the fireworks with a nice big hang of Mayer Mica. I heded down to Autograph to help my old mate PJ with the re-working of the Saturday Night Fever we put into Madrid at the beginning of 2009. It was coming out of Madrid and going out on Spanish tour, however all the kit had come back to Autograph to tuned into a easy to move quick tour. I enede up going out to Valencia for a week to help PJ fit up the first venue with the Spanish Show Crew who were to tour it.
After a few days at home I went off to the NEC for a job with Delta for Toyota, their Dealer Managers conference, an intresting couple of days. Then well that was pretty much Christmas! The first year my daughter of nearly 2½ was starting to excited by it all.
Between Christmas and New Year there was a bit of a lastminute.com gig of pulling in some cables and reterminating some other things at Jeff Waynes’ Olliewood Studios as they have now replaced the Digidesign ProControl with a D-Control ES.

Most of January was taken up with We Will Rock You out of Edinburgh and into O2 Dublin also knows as The Point, in addition to the kit we had on the tour we had some Martin W8L’s and W8LS form Capitol the O2 was considerably bigger than anywhere else the tour had played. It took Toby and my self a few days of prepping bits down at Autograph and a couple of extra days in the arena to get it all ready. The opening night was not great, what with Electrics tripping their incoming power supply during the second number and then us haivng the D5t12 crash during the second half. Not a great moment to be gathered around the Front of House Area. Nor for the poor company manager who had to go on stage and with no control of the PA system try and convey information to the 6000 plus people sat in the arena. It was all tracked down to a corupt desk file, Thankfully it was posible to roll back to the Edinburgh show and rebuild a lot of the changes from memory.

Febuary had me down at the Adeplhi Theatre in the West End with the other usual suspects from Autograph putting in Andrew Lloyd Webbers’ Love Never Dies. Lots of Mayer speakers, an SD7 and a SD7 Extension at front of house and a SD8 sorting all the monitor sends out in the sub stage. Though I was mainly involved with cabeling up the pit as most of the other work had already been done.
During this month I was also back at the What’s on Stage awards with Mr Ben Harison not quite as raucus as last year but still a good event and a lot of famous faces there.

Right now I am out on the Katherine Jenkins Tour, where I am looking after keyboards and playback and the wireless comms.

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