Conducted by Keith Lockhart, the Boston Pops mounts a Holiday Tour during the first two weeks of December and last year their in-house team was supported by Scorpio Sound of West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. For the second leg of the tour, performing shows from Norfolk in Virginia to Bridgeport, Connecticut they had the chance to use a DiGiCo D5 Live digital mixing console as their front of house desk.
Steve Colby has been FOH engineer for the Pops for over 20 years, working alongside monitor engineer Howard Rose, system technician Kevin Delany and assistant system tech Mark McArthur. This year the production featured the Boston Pops 90-piece orchestra, who also tour with a 60-voice chorus, and this year featured singer Haley Westenra from New Zealand.
Colby has had the chance to mix the orchestra on a variety of different consoles. "Mixing on the DiGiCo D5 Live was a great experience for me," he says. "The sound of our show took a giant step forward with the development of modern line-array technology [they use a JBL Vertec system supported by Lake Contour Controllers], and another great stride was made with the integration of digital loudspeaker processors from XTA and now the Lake Contour controller. With the addition of the D5, the level of sonic clarity in the system is superlative and translates a sense of detail that we had not heard in the show before."
"Since our venues range in size from 2,000 seat theatres to 10,000 seat arenas, it was a terrific advantage to have a FOH setup with the small footprint afforded by the D5," continues Colby. "On one particular show, the sound truck got held up in traffic caused by an unfortunate accident, and was almost three hours late for load-in. Because of the D5's compact size and its dynamics and effects integration - in fact, we had no external dynamics or effects on this leg of the tour - it allowed FOH setup to be accomplished in just minutes, so we could move on quickly with the stage setup."
(Lee Baldock)
