With the continuing development of the Wembley site, the next stage of the regeneration is the pulling down of Wembley Conference Centre after 30 years of holding numerous conferences, seminars and private parties. For the final time, the venue was used by an American composer, Yoav Goren to showcase his work to a selected audience.
Goren who is responsible for creating trailer music for many blockbuster movies including Spiderman, Van Helsing and X-Men, has developed his trailers into full music compositions and was performing them using a 65 piece orchestra, 60 piece choir and full rock band, which included Feeder's drummer (who worked with Aerosmith and Bon Jovi).
Pearce Hire's Andy White headed the team and designed the PA system for the event. The first challenge was the vast quantity of both people and instruments on the stage which resulted in 120 open microphones. Particular attention had to be taken with the design of the system to ensure that the engineers had full control of the system with sufficient isolation from the stage but at the same time the system had to achieve coherent reinforcement that was focused from the stage.
White explained: "To overcome this challenge and the added difficulty represented by the audience's positioning all around the stage area, a system based around a central mono cluster above the centre vocalist was created. This consisted of 16 L'acoustics Arcs, eight wide and two deep, to achieve 180 degrees of uniform coverage. The outer edges of the audience were covered by additional clusters of Arcs flown following the stage edge from L'acoustics ArcBumps giving the system designer very accurate control in the vertical plane.
"To allow the FOH engineer to add space into the mix two additional clusters of Arc's were flown approximately 10m wide either side of the stage for stereo image. These were fed predominately with reverbs and a sub-mix of the choir. The front-fills were taken care of by ten L'acoustics MTD108a's; sub-bass L'acoustics - SB218's and SB118 were also incorporated into the system."
The aesthetics and logistics of the PA system also had to be taken into consideration, with a ten camera film crew recording the show for a DVD, meaning sightlines and equipment had to be aesthetically pleasing This in turn affected the logistics of where monitors and equipment could be placed around the venue.
Creating a FOH control system at the venue, Pearce Hire provided a Yamaha PM5d digital console to handle the main mix and Yamaha DM2000 (at 72 channels) handling orchestra and choir sub-mix.
White continued: "The monitor control system employed a Soundcraft MH4 - 52ch as main board with Yamaha DM1000 handling orchestra and choir sub-mix for monitors, and all stage monitoring was L'acoustics 115xt HiQ wedges for the band comprising of 12 in total with 18 Shure PSM systems creating a combination of hard-wired & radio providing both mixes and basic click track for members of the performance as required.
The show was recorded on dual 72 way pro-tools systems located in the venue's basement with two systems running simultaneously for complete back-up. The 120 mic lines were monitored and split by XTA active lines systems."
The show's lighting, designed by Sara Burns, incorporated all the in-house generics to ensure the level of light was optimum for the DVD filming. Pearce Hire supplemented the house lighting rig with a combination of 40 Martin Mac 550s and 600s along with eight atomic strobes, which was controlled by an Avolites Pearl 2004.
(Chris Henry)
