The show's orchestration places instruments in three separate locations in the theatre: guitars are situated on one platform, keyboards and miscellaneous percussion on another, and a full drum kit on a third. To make this layout work, Stage Entertainment, producer of Zorro The Musical needed a way to configure the monitor mixes to keep all the musicians on cue and in time while also minimising cost and setup time.
"We had only one day for soundcheck with the musicians, so we needed to spend less time on gear settings and more time on sound," says Bertrand Billon, audio manager with Stage Entertainment. "With the Aviom system, all we had to do was run Cat 5 around the theatre, cut it on site, and put the plugs at both ends. It couldn't have been faster or easier. Plus, using Cat 5 helps keep production costs down."
For Zorro, the setup consists of a Y1 A-Net card installed in a Yamaha M7CL console at front of house. Monitor mix elements such as direct outputs, sub-mixes, and stems from the console are routed by the mix engineer to the 16 channels of the Y1 card. From there, the digital signal is output to an A-16D Pro A-Net Distributor, which sends the mix stems via Cat-5 cable to eight A-16II Personal Mixers located on the three platforms. Each personal mixer provides a 16-channel mix feed for the show's eight musicians that they can customize as needed. The guitar and keyboard-percussion sections use wired in-ear systems, while the drum section uses noise cancelling headphones.
Another benefit of the Aviom personal mixers is that they let users save and recall their personal mix settings. "Since Zorro has three groups of musicians, being able to recall the settings is very useful. It lets all the musicians be at their best, without requiring a lot of adjustment," says Billon.
(Jim Evans)
