News Archives

It’s been quite a busy time here at Arc Sound HQ!

Starting off the summer season with perhaps it’s biggest bang, and a personal career goal. Arc Sound Director, James Dougill was requested to cover front of house mix duties for Lionel Richie at this years Capital Radio Summertime ball. Undertaking this role on behalf of our colleagues at Wigwam, Dougill had also covered house mix duties for Shontelle earlier in the evening.  This annual concert attended by some 50,000 ticketholders featured a plethora of stunning performances by pop music’s finest, including amongst others Leona Lewis,  James Morrison, JLS, Blue, Calvin Harris and Enrique Inglesias

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lionel Richie. The consummate entertainer performs to a packed Emirates Stadium!

In what has so far proved to be the only consistent period of summer weather in the whole of South East England! Vampire Weekend requested the services of James Dougill to cover house mixing duties for their live performance supporting the sell out Blur concerts in London’s Hyde Park. While basking in the beautiful July afternoon sunshine, the 55,000 strong audience, had earlier in the day also been  entertained by support performances from Amadou & Mariam, Florence And The Machine, and Deerhoof. 

 

 

 

 

Vampire Weekend. XL Recordings Conference and Blur Support

During their brief visit,  the band had also squeezed in a performance at the Pall Mall Institute of Contempory arts, for their record company XL Recordings’ annual conference. With proposed change over times of around 3-5 minutes between performances, we specified and provided a full digital front-of-house control package for the concert, thus allowing all sound-checks, effect and media playback settings to be stored as scene change data for immediate recall.   

Recording the Eden Sessions 2009.

This year we were again proud to continue our now long standing role as an audio production supplier to the Eden Project. Following on from the initial multi-track recording successes of last years Eden Sessions. Production manager Adrian Burt of Wavelength chose to increase the multi-track recording capability at this years 2009 Eden Sessions to include;  a devoted digital recording console (In the form of a Yamaha M7CL), and longitudinal time-code synchronisation between the multi-track audio hard disc recorders and cameras.  Headline performances this year included Paul Weller, Kasabian, Razorlight and The Kooks.

 5.1 surround sound design for Couture 50th 

 

Mid July saw us bring to fruition, several months of planning and studio based pre-production on a highly refined, Couture birthday party event for our friends at Lillingston. On what unfortunately turned out to be one of the wettest weekends we’ve seen throughout the whole of the summer season. We deployed a very large 5.1 surround system on the banks of a lake, to provide integral audio production support to a set performance piece, featuring a cast of 50 Roman Gladiators and a 20metre wide water-screen effect!   Given the Rome themed event brief, we initially studio edited a 10 minute piece of music, which was then over-laid with surround sound effects.  The full multi-track piece was played back in the software domain, allowing on site short notice amendments to accommodate production timing changes. Then with all amendments finalised following site rehearsals with full cast, lighting and special effects, the completed piece was rendered as a Dolby® AC-3 encoded file and mastered onsite to Audio DVD to preserve the high sample rate and bit depth fidelity.

With several function bands lined up across three separate stages to provide reception, dinner and party entertainment. We utilised a full digital control package, employing separate stage boxes to facilitate seamless (cue to cue) changeovers.  Additionally, the instant scene change capability of the main front of house console was utilised to control all system alignment delay, matrix gain structure, and mute changes when switching between the live performances and 5.1 theatre, water-screen entertainment.  The main surround system comprised 16 x JBL VerTec 4887A loudspeaker elements,  2 JBL VS3215 Venue cabinets together with 8 ASW218’s providing a substantial sub-bass component. A further 8 x JBL VRX928 and 8 x JBL MS28 cabinets were employed as reception, dining marquee and bathroom delays.  Stage monitoring across all three stages comprised 8 x Turbosound TFM330, 8 x Turbosound TFM250, 2 x Turbosound TXD115, 2 x Turbosound TXD121, 4 x ASW2110 and 2 x Sennheiser EW300G2 IEM.

Immergroen Arts Festival 2009

Despite being initially plagued by problems with artists visas, the wrong sized stage, late arriving generators and temporary electrical power distribution. Not to mention some of the worst torrential rain we’ve had the miss-fortune to work in all summer!

By hook and most definitely by crook, Immergroen made it’s debut onto the UK festival circuit.  As currently the UK’s only festival devoted to

 

 

South African culture and arts, the three day event held at the Hertfordshire County Showground featured an exclusive all star line up of South African Musicians and bands. As the audio production supplier to the festival, we were on point to at least make sure every word and lyric of Afrikaans could be clearly heard, if not entirely understood, by the audio production crew!

The Hollies concerts

Pleasantly rounding off July, we completed a series of sold out concerts for The Hollies, providing full audio production at both their Littlecote House (Hungerford), and Nidd Hall (Harrogate) dates, plus a one-off guest engineering role, for their Gawsworth Hall near Macclesfield date. The band treated audiences at all three venues to songs from the new forthcoming album “Then, Now, Always”. In addition to the guaranteed crowd pleasing hits set that has consistently kept the band’s tours and live dates in demand.

Busy with Back-line for Mini 50th Birthday Bash

Back in early May, we were busy providing support to our friends at Monchspfeffer GmbH with their bespoke,  live music, dance and performance component, at the International Mini Dealer Conference. We supplied full back-line and technical support to the performers, across the two stages of this spectacular event, held at the London Excel exhibition centre.

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