Although the Imperial Ice Stars have toured their balletic ice-skating productions across the world, the eight Albert Hall performances broke a long-standing convention and featured a live 20-piece orchestra, under the baton of composer Tim A Duncan. An innovative solution was needed to handle the monitoring requirements of the musicians, positioned behind the stage rather than in the pit.
For the occasion, SFL Group purchased 10 RSS M-48 Personal Monitor Mixers from the Roland Systems Group, together with two S-4000D Splitter and Power Distributors and a 40-channel I/O modular rack.
Forty channels of microphone signals from the 20 musicians were sent to the S-4000S rack and were then split to the M-48 mixer units and out to the front-of-house console.
"The monitor engineer used to use a console to check submixes and set the gain structure for the orchestral mics," explains SFL's Mark Payne, who was mixing front-of-house for the show. "Now he uses a laptop to simply configure the system and set the gains on the S-4000S rack, the musicians set their own mixes on the M-48 units and the monitor engineer is free to roam in a supportive role."
SFL was one of the UK's early adopters of the RSS suite of digital audio products, and has supplied M-48 personal monitor systems to a number of other end-users, particularly for applications in houses of worship. "The M-48 has the flexibility that other personal monitoring mixers lack," says Mark Payne. "It is a true 40-channel mixer, offering 16 very flexible subgroups so it's ideal for doing complex productions. The sound quality is superb, offering excellent headroom, and the ambient microphone on the unit is a nice touch: musicians can turn this up and spin ambient sound into their headphones, which creates a very natural scenario, especially for orchestral players who are used to playing near other people."
The 10x M-48 units have been distributed between different sections of the orchestra: brass players are sharing, woodwind players are sharing, pianist and percussionist get their own units as does composer/conductor Tim A Duncan. "Two musicians can happily use the same unit because there are two headphone outputs," explains Payne, who also points out that everyone is playing to a clicktrack. "The live music is heavily augmented by a string section recording by the Moscow State Cinematic Orchestra. This is played back on Digital Performer running off a Mac, along with the special effects."
(Jim Evans)
