Starring Tinchy Stryder, Seasick Steve and folk rock band Mumford & Sons, the three-day festival focuses on indie, alternative and local music. The festival began as a single day event in 2001 and has grown since then to three days, adding two campsites. Programmer Florian Baeumler and lighting designer Andy Finn used a full size ETC Congo on the main stage this year, with a Congo jr as backup, supplied by Hawthorne Theatrical.
"This is the second time I've worked on the lighting for Summer Sundae," says Baeumler, "but only the first time we've used Congo control. I love the versatility of the desk and its ability to handle live events with ease. It makes a big difference that you can program blind, not affecting what's happening on stage - you can see what changes are being made to the lighting on the three monitors.
"The stage lighting is made up of 120 LED fixtures arranged in a three triangles, and in order to create the lighting, we set the lighting up in groups. The effects engine makes that really easy to do. The desk is amazingly reliable. With other desks we would expect the occasional software crash, especially given the damp and cool conditions in which we use it. But it performed impeccably - it just worked. We were also very impressed with the technical support and backup we received from ETC."
Andy Finn adds, "Using Congo on the festival was borne out of using it on other shows over the past few years. I really enjoyed working with it; rather than have it dictate how I should be using it, it seemed to adapt to my preferred way of working. It didn't demand that I remember the channels and groups that I had been working on some hours back, and became less of a number crunching exercise than many other desks."
(Jim Evans)
