The Paisley Musical & Operatic Society was able to use the original set from the West End production, and in all other respects aspired towards the highest professional standards for their show, retaining amateur status only in the sense of not being paid. Alan Beattie of Sono Vie, the production services rental company, points out that "members of the public assumed it was a professional production, which in technical terms it was."
With 30 characters moving on and off stage, the show deployed 32 channels of radio mics, with the leading men double-miked. Alan Beattie, who was mixing front-of-house with an assistant engineer, had miked up and DI'd the orchestra, deploying one S-4000 and two S-1608 RSS Digital Snakes and stageboxes for his house PA infrastructure. "Set-up couldn't have been easier. The theatre has a duct in the floor, and we just pulled through three CAT5 cables from stage to front-of-house."
Linking two RSS M-400 digital consoles together, a first for Sono Vie, Beattie was making use of Roland control software (RCS) which is packaged free with the S-4000 Digital Snake. From the PC beside the FOH desk, the RCS software provided a visual display of level for all the mic channels, which was viewed on a screen at the side of the stage. There, a technician was easily able to see the status of all the mics, with the ability if necessary to pre-fade listen to each channel.
"We've had nothing but praise for the show sound, which was superb," says Beattie, himself a long-time user of Roland equipment and an early adopter and beta tester of the M-400. "We like the M-400 desk so much that we sell it to other people," he says. "It's small, light and portable, and suitable for anything from a three-channel speech reinforcement job to big outdoor events for 10,000 people in central Glasgow."
(Jim Evans)
