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UK - The Last Ship made its returning debut at Northern Stage in Newcastle in March. This musical, written by Sting and Lorne Campbell, is a drama with songs bound together across two strong interwoven narratives.
Sound designer Sebastian Frost used d&b Soundscape, a signal processing technology, with two optional software modules: En-Scene a sound object positioning tool, and En-Space which allows designers to add room emulation of reverberation signatures particular to any given space, real or imagined. Frost harnessed this technology to his own vision of how the musical should be perceived and enjoyed by all audience members.
“I went to hear a demo in Hall 14 at d&b’s HQ in Backnang about a year ago,” Frost comments. “The experience was inspirational because the biggest thing you want from any system is that it doesn’t tie you down or restri

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USA - Shortly after it opened in 1917, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia was heralded as “the greatest 20th century accomplishment of any city in the world.” More than a slight exaggeration perhaps, but for the past 101 years, the mile-long road in the City of Brotherly Love has brimmed with creative activity, hosting historic concerts and serving as home to great works of art like Rodin’s The Thinker.
This Labour Day Weekend, the famous boulevard reverberated with a distinctly 21st century form of artistic expression when it hosted the Jay-Z curated Made In America EDM festival. For all its rich history, though, the Philadelphia landmark does have spatial restrictions that aren’t found in typical (and lager) festival sites. This presented lighting designer Patrick Dierson of The Activity with some unique challenges, but he overcame them in
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UK - The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School utilises an Electro Kabuki system to stage a kabuki drop.
The system uses electromagnetic technology and a load hook. At its heart is the same technology used in life-critical safety applications on oil rigs and shipping to release heavy-duty shuttering to prevent the spread of fire. The solutions is also a more reliable theatrical reveal technology compared to solutions deployed in the past, such as strings and ropes, loops and pins, or wooden spars fitted with cup hooks.
The system was supplied and is supported by Electro Kabuki distributor and theatrical chandlers, Flints.
The syllabus at the Bristol Old Vic school includes staging and rigging for events and shows, with a focus on the history of special effects, including staged reveals. Over the centuries, productions have used a huge variety of techniques and mechanis

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Sweden - Stockholmsmässan - the Stockholm International Fairs and Congress Centre - recently installed 68 channels of the Shure Axient Digital Wireless System.
The dedicated in-house AV department, which oversees the small, mid-size, and large conference and exhibition applications, needed a dependable wireless system with excellent performance. Fredrik Zetterberg, head of production event technologies, says that the system had “exceeded all expectations in sonic quality”.
“Axient Digital is the best sound quality we’ve ever heard in a digital system,” explains Zetterberg. “From exhibitions to corporate events, we use Axient Digital constantly. This month we will use 132 systems for a two-day corporate event, with a total of 212 wireless systems in operation, showcasing the system’s flexibility and reliability.”
The installation was managed by s

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South Korea - Kinoton Korea recently equipped Incheon SK Happy Dream Stadium with a complete networked sound reinforcement system by Harman Professional Solutions.
Built in 2001, SK Happy Dream Stadium plays host to home games by SK Wyverns, a professional baseball team based in Incheon, South Korea. As part of a continuous effort to improve the stadium, which seats 25,000 fans, the stadium recently decided to upgrade the stadium’s aging sound system.
In order to provide fans with a rich audio experience with superior coverage and intelligibility, SK Wyverns hired local audio integrator Kinoton Korea to design and install a premium sound reinforcement system. Kinoton Korea selected a complete Harman networked audio solution for its sound quality and reliable performance.
The Harman system installed by Kinoton at SK Happy Dream Stadium features a range of weathe

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Vietnam - Ba Sao Investment recently deployed a full-scale Harman Professional Solutions AV Solution at FLC Samson to provide a luxury entertainment experience for guests.
FLC Group is a leading real estate developer in Vietnam with over 16 years of experience in resort-oriented facilities, ranging from beach villas to high-rise hotels. Their flagship property, the FLC Samson - a luxury hotel and resort on the coast of the East Vietnam Sea - is known for staging show-stopping performances from globally renowned artists in their 1,200-seat Plenary Ball Room.
FLC Group recently hired Ba Sao Investment to design a full-scale AV solution at FLC Samson to elevate the sound quality of these performances both in the ball room and throughout the resort.
“FLC Samson is a five-star luxury resort, and we needed an AV solution that could provide five-star sound,” a spok

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USA - Sooner Routhier and Robert Long of SRae Productions are behind the production design for Halsey’s Hopeless Fountain Kingdom world tour, with Ashley Frangipane (Halsey) herself the show’s creative director.
54 Robe Spiider LED wash beams, a new investment by DCR Nashville, lighting vendors for the US legs of the tour, are a vital part of the lighting rig.
The tour started in autumn 2017, and SRae submitted their initial proposals in May of last year. At the start, Halsey suggested a Romeo & Juliet-esque romantic look, so original versions of the set were based on this. However, once SRae began to also design promo and award show performances, an alternative approach evolved.
When it came to specifying lighting kit for the tour, lighting director on the road Craig Rutherford - who has worked with Halsey in this role since the latter stages of t

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UK - Pro audio provider The Warehouse concluded a successful Edinburgh International Festival last month having provided advanced audio solutions for the spectacular opening and closing events and many shows in-between. This year, The Warehouse also became an audio partner for the innovative Light on Shore with Edinburgh Gin Seaside season with loudspeaker brand Adamson.
Celebrating the creativity, originality and international impact of Scottish popular music, Light on Shore featured 16 events across 14 nights, running throughout August at Leith Theatre. Closed for almost 30 years, the International Festival welcomed audiences to this venue, situated in one of Edinburgh's most vibrant and creative districts.
Graeme Brown from The Warehouse was systems engineer on site for the whole run. The front of house system consisted of 24 Adamson S10 line array lo

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UK - Lighting designers draw their inspiration from a variety of sources. Sometimes it may be the artwork on a client’s album. At others, the spark comes from the lyrics of a hit song. Simon Horn’s captivating design for Anastacia’s Evolution Tour grew out of the name of the tour itself, as is evidenced by the DNA-shaped double helix set pieces that run across the back of the stage.
Like the evolutionary process, Horn’s design has been adaptive, allowing him to maintain the look of his show as the tour moves through a wide variety of venues, often incorporating house lights into its rig. Key to this flexibility has been his ChamSys MagicQ MQ500 Stadium console.
“We started as a full production tour at theatres and small arena venues, then went to a mix of shows, including multi-band festivals this summer, often working with locally supplied rigs,” says Ho

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Germany - As part of a spectacular and very emotional staged event at the Meyer shipyard in Papenburg, the first LPG-powered cruise ship, the AIDAnova, received its formal baptism. At the same time, this marked the world premiere of the full production version of GLP’s new KNV system.
At first only heartbeats were heard, then powerful lasers drew the contours of the gigantic ship into the pitch-black night. Light and lasers combined to slowly bring the 337m long and 70m high ship to life. The backbone of the imposing, and slowly revealing staging, which culminated in a golden firework display, was formed by a matrix consisting of 300 GLP KNV modules. These had been placed at irregular intervals on the balcony railings of AIDAnova.
The Berlin artist collective phase7, based around director Sven Sören Beyer, had already inspired the general public and professionals al

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Italy - It was the summer of 2015 and start up entrepreneur Fabio Zaffagnini was taking a drive, listening to the Foo Fighters on the radio - and dreaming that they might one day perform in his home city of Cesena, near Florence. To entice such a big act to a city so small, it would take a gesture of gargantuan proportions. And so the Rockin’ 1000 was born - he set about assembling 1,000 musicians in a park for a special one off performance of the Foo Fighters track Learn To Fly.
The biggest rock band in the world made history with millions of YouTube views worldwide, grabbing the attention of the Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl who promised to play for the 1000 in Cesena - and did just that on 3 November the same year.
An expression of Italy’s passion, creativity and artistic skill, this was just the beginning for Rockin’ 1000 which has

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Belgium - Pukkelpop is Belgium’s second largest festival and prides itself on its ‘alternative’ label. Featuring performances by nearly 100 different artists on eight stages over four days, this year three Yamaha Rivage series digital mixing systems were in use, along with Nexo PAs.
This year Pukkelpop took place on 15-18 August, with Yamaha Rivage PM7 and PM10 systems featured on the Club Stage and CL series consoles on the Lift Stage. The Club and Castello Stages featured Nexo STM series PA systems.
All Yamaha and Nexo systems were supplied by VDB-PA, except the RIVAGE PM7 which was supplied by AED Rent.
More than 25 bands performed on the Club Stage, including Shellac (with legendary producer/engineer Steve Albini on guitar/vocals), Rhey, Madensuyu, Dirty Projectors, Metz, Benjamin Clementine, Jordan Rakei, Gogo Pinguin and King Gizzard & The Lizard

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UK - Merseyside-based Adlib Audio handled a busy festival programme through the summer of 2018. As early-adopters of Outline’s remarkable new processor, the variety and sheer volume of their workload provided an ideal platform to road-test their new Newton units - and road-test them they surely did.
Adlib’s senior engineer Ian Nelson takes up the story: “For this summer’s festival commitments we’ve effectively used our Newton units in one of two ways - either as a festival console matrix system or as a full system controller. For the former, a single Newton device was configured as a central hub, bringing together the outputs of our dual house consoles (running as an A/B system to facilitate band changeovers) plus multiple guest consoles and our small ‘VT’ desk that deals with VT, DJs and announcements.
“The two house consoles are configured to provide

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UK - The recently-built Anjuman El-Saifee Community Centre in Birmingham, UK is benefitting from Powersoft’s Ottocanali 4K4 amp which was specified as part of the AV installation. With good speech intelligibility at the forefront of requirements for a House of Worship, Powersoft’s Ottocanali product was chosen for the project.
The Dawoodi Bohra community spent years fundraising, planning and preparing to build the Community Centre comprising a mosque, evening school and sports hall – and as with any House of Worship, it would require a robust AV system so that the imams and speakers could clearly project their message to the audience.
Pete Rutherford owns and runs Direct Audio Visual, which was engaged as AV integrator for the project. With a background in retail, corporate and warehouses, this House of Worship project was a departure for Rutherford and his team

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New Zealand - There are plenty of jokes about changing light bulbs, but they usually don’t involve 80 fittings. However, that was the brief for Nick Abel and Mike Jones, the managing directors of New Zealand’s LS Group, when they were contacted by the management of Auckland’s Victory Convention Centre.
The Centre is a house of worship that also features a timber-lined 2,200-seat, tiered auditorium, which is often used for concerts, conferences, symposiums, small exhibitions and expos.
“They approached us late last year to look at options to upgrade their house lighting systems to LED from the old incandescent system, which was installed in the Eighties when the Centre was built,” says Nick.
“We did some research and modelling and went back to them with a few different options using the Chroma-Q Inspire multi-purpose creative lighting range. It was th

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USA - Space was a consideration as alt-rock pioneers Stone Temple Pilots (STP), Bush and The Cult teamed up for their summer-long, triple-headline Revolution 3 Tour across North America.
Speaking from the bus on a day off, monitor engineer and crew chief Sean Herman, FOH engineer James “Hootsie” Huth and system engineer Chris Demonbreun held forth on the joys of the road and why they chose the DiGiCo SD12s that are at FOH and monitor world for the STP portions of each show.
“When we started this tour, everything had to fit into a trailer,” says Hootsie. “We started before this three-band run doing large clubs and small theatres. This being Stone Temple Pilots, it’s a rock band, we need maybe 24 inputs max. The travelling plans meant we had to go with the smallest frame size possible and it looked like the SD12 had all the inputs and horsepower we would need

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USA - An annual tradition since the early 20th century, the burning of Zozobra during the Fiestas de Santa Fe is said to make all concerns and worries go up in smoke, giving everyone a fresh new start. “Zozobra is all about burning gloom away,” said John Garberson of Creative BackStage, which lit the August 31 ceremony at Santa Fe’s Fort Marcy Ballpark and Magers Field with help from Chauvet Professional Maverick and Rogue fixtures.
This year, however, there was also plenty of gloom in the skies. Severe thunderstorms pounded Santa Fe during the hot late summer evening, forcing organizers to move the burning of the 50’ high marionette effigy up by 15 minutes during a clearing between two storm cells. Still, “old man gloom,” dressed in 1960s hippie garb, went up in flames over a half-hour period before the 62,460 who had gathered in the park.
The inclement w

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Italy - In July 2015, an ambitious plan was hatched to get the attention of Foo Fighters and convince them to play a gig in Cesena, Italy, by gathering a thousand musicians to perform their song Learn to Fly. The video of the event went viral and Foo Fighters duly performed in the city four months later. But that was just the start. Now an annual event, this year Yamaha digital mixers were tasked with mixing a band of over 1,500 members.
Rockin’1000 That’s Live has already become so successful that, for the past two years, ‘the biggest rock band on earth’ has had to relocate to the bigger Stadio Artemio Franchi in Firenze (Florence), around 2.5 hours from Cesena.
Yamaha Commercial Audio Italia is a technical partner of the event and this year staff were faced with the huge task of mixing Front of House and monitors for an 18 song, two-hour perform

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Croatia - Rock band Prljavo Kazalište ended their 40th anniversary tour with a show-stopping stadium concert at the Kranjceviceva football stadium in the heart of capital city Zagreb.
The final concert was sold out well in advance and 30,000 fans rocked up to be part of his special event for which lighting designer Sven Kučinić from LumiLas LLC specified over 120 Robe moving lights, provided, together with the other lighting production, by Croatian rental company ELDRA.
The band was formed in Zagreb and in 1977 / 78 first stormed onto the raw, bleeding edge of the punk scene there in the then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was highly symbolic for them to return to the hub of the city and play in the stadium, entertaining fans original and new, some of whom have followed Prljavo Kazalište all the way through the intense geopolitical and cultural change

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USA - UK band alt-J, currently on a world tour in support of their third studio album, 2017’s Relaxer, recently made history as the first rock band to use L-Acoustics’ L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology to envelop nearly 12,000 fans in a 360° soundscape at Forest Hills Stadium in the New York borough of Queens on June 15.
“Wherever you’re standing in the audience, you’ll be able to hear the music coming from all around you,” alt-J keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton told UK music publication NME ahead of the show.
Lance Reynolds is alt-J’s Chicago-based FOH engineer and has been using L-Acoustics sound reinforcement systems with the band since 2015. He notes that the band’s manager, Stephen Taverner, had been searching for the right technology to present a show in surround for quite a while, so Reynolds visited L-Acoustics’ US headq

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UK - Signify reports that its new Philips Vari-Lite VL800 BeamLine luminaire delivered a striking stage presence for US rock band Glassjaw at their recent show at London’s O2 Academy Brixton. Lighting designer Hayden Borgars used the dynamic, linear LED effects fixtures to deliver an atmospheric lighting design with a modern edge for this ‘post-hardcore’ band.
“I knew I wanted the main fixture to be a linear fixture, but one that could produce deep reds and blues, the two main colours in my design,” says Borgars. “As soon as I was introduced to the VL800 BeamLine at Prolight+Sound in Frankfurt this year, I knew it was the perfect fixture for what I wanted to achieve.”
The VL800 BeamLine creates a tight, bright, flattened light beam. Thanks to the individual control of its 12 LED cells and its continuous pan and tilt rotation, it also offers endless flexib

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USA - As ‘phase two’ of a major audio upgrade, Crossroads Community Church of Vancouver, Washington, has added three Allen & Heath dLive systems to mix FOH, stage monitors, and broadcast.
Remington Smith, Crossroads’ FOH sound engineer, says: “We found we couldn’t beat the sonic quality or the amount of I/O we were able to achieve with the dLive.”
Crossroads’ contemporary worship services feature a live band with three to six vocalists, recorded tracks, and an occasional string section. The church holds three services each Sunday in its 1800-seat sanctuary, in addition to hosting Christian music concerts and holiday events. Worship services are broadcast live on the church’s website [crossroadslive.tv] using a dLive C Class C3500 Surface, DX32 Expander and DM0 MixRack.
At FOH, Crossroads uses a dLive S Class S7000 Surface with DM64 MixRack. S

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UK - Aurora Lighting is supporting lighting director Gurdip Mahal, on the latest run of live eviction shows at the Celebrity Big Brother House.
Complementing the installation’s glitzy, bright neon backdrop, Aurora has delivered a comprehensive ‘live event’ package to assist in delivering the suitably vibrant spectacle that accompanies the departure of the latest housemate to be voted out of the CBB House.
Held in the custom built ‘eviction arena’, sited adjacent to the infamous Big Brother House at Elstree Studios, the evictions take place against a grand curved video wall and feature a heady mix of theatrical and full on rockshow lighting looks.
Working with gaffer Richard Shout, Aurora has once again supplied the crew with a range of fixtures to help create the spectacle, complete with intense colour washes and overhead searchlight effects.

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Hungary - Such is Capital Sound’s long-term and consolidated contract with the Sziget Festival organisation, that the rock-solid production formula now ensures that the massive seven-day festival on Hajógyári Island, north of Budapest, runs seamlessly.
With Martin Audio MLA again reinforcing sound on the main and second stages, and further Martin Audio PA on the Colosseum dance stage, the biggest news was that in its 26th year the event again broke attendance records, with an aggregated 565,000 estimated to have visited the picturesque location on the Danube, over the seven days.
A veritable line-up this year included Arctic Monkeys, Stormzy, Clean Bandit, Kendrick Lamar, Gorillaz, Lana Del Rey, Mumford & Sons, Dua Lipa - and many more. And with such an international line-up of A-listers, Capital account manager Paul Timmins says: “All the top acts bring exp
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