Concept Solution's Raphael Rupprecht explains what was involved at this truly massive event. "This is a three-day festival featuring open-air stages around the island," he says. "We started working at 9am every day, bands arrived at 10am for soundcheck and the show itself ran from 3pm to 12pm. It was a huge workload - we had to set up our standard backline, plus the individual amps and instruments for each band and sometimes there were as many as four drum kits on stage waiting to be miked up - but all acts ran smoothly and the overall mood was great.
"The starting point for each act was a standard console setup, which was adapted as needed. I had prepared eight effects: drum plate, percussion room, medium plate, guitar chorus, vocal plate, warm hall, simple delay, kick ambience, which was plenty for most requirements.
"The SD8's onboard matrix allows for 12 busses in addition to the 24 stereo busses, which is very special. We used this to feed main PA, subs, outfill, frontfill, delays and VIP area. The full processing, plus dynamic EQs and multiband dynamics, even on the matrix busses, resulted in a powerful and perfectly balanced sound in every area, which was very nice."
The majority of the bands had their own FOH engineer with them, with Raphael Rupprecht mixing those that didn't. Concept Solutions also provided a monitor engineer, as only a few bands had taken their own.
(Jim Evans)
