Sound Stylists at Joburg Day
- Details
The owner of Sound Stylists, Kevin Glover, is no stranger to Joburg Day and remembers the early days when the festival was hosted at Gold Reef City. A capacity crowd in those days was 2 500. “This year we supplied the full infrastructure from power to lighting, audio and screens,” said Colin Loock, branch manager at Sound Stylists. As for Kevin, he was stationed at FOH, looking after each of the band’s FOH engineers while sound engineer Shaun Hershel took care of the monitors on stage. Colin managed the stage with the rest of the team.
The sound system included a DiGiCo SD10 which was used for monitors. “They were fantastic as always,” said Colin. “At FOH we had two SD8s, used between the different acts, with an S21 in the middle. We basically fed the two SD8s into the S21. All MC microphones and background music were run through the S21 to free up the SD8’s so that bands could come and do their pre-patching, line checks and load up their shows. It also meant that the engineers could add their own EQ, effects and layout to their desk and thus giving peace of mind and far greater levels of comfort. Someone from our side was also always on hand to assist with any of their requirements.”
Each of the SD8’s ran a Digi Rack via an RME Madiface as the signal runs were just over 100m so BNC wasn’t really an option. The SD10 was running two SD Racks and all input signal was then fed through XTA DP8000’s.
Two sets of backline were provided, so while the one band was playing, the second band was setting up and getting comfortable on the gear.
Emmarentia Dam is within a residential area, and with this in mind, Sound Stylists had to comply to keep within the db levels. “DiGiCo helped from a control point of view,” added Colin. “It worked fantastically because we had our main hangs, out fills, front fills and delays all controlled from DiGiCo’s powerful matrix system.”
(Jim Evans)
