The Fringe is renowned as a difficult taskmaster on both equipment and staff alike. A month of relentless hard work, with shows continually playing from morning through to the early hours of the following day, staff have to grab sleep where they can and equipment is invariably left powered up for the duration.
Add into that mix many of the venues are in 'found' spaces, or parts of university buildings, that aren't designed for live shows and the size of the task becomes even more apparent.
"It's always a challenge and the equipment needs to be up to it too," says Matthew Ferrie, Pleasance head of sound, as he leaps up to a precarious-looking mix position, sweeping dust from the crumbling plaster of Pleasance Two's walls from the QL5.
Supplied by Orbital Sound, Pleasance is a long-term user of Yamaha mixing consoles. This year, QL1s were installed in the Queen Dome, Ace Dome, Pleasance Forth and the Cabaret Bar, QL5s in Pleasance Two and Pleasance Beyond, as well as a Yamaha CL5 in Pleasance Grand and some LS9s and 01Vs in smaller venues.
"At Pleasance we strive to provide the highest quality equipment, even in the smallest venues, which is why we put Yamaha digital consoles in all the spaces we can," says Matthew.
"The mix position in some of the venues is tiny or awkward to get to, so the footprint of the console is really important. There are a lot of funny-shaped rooms where we can't just do proscenium left/right and a couple of delays. There will maybe a L/R of some sort, then a fill here and a fill there, some delays there, other delays over there.
"Even for things like stand up comedy, where all they need is an offstage mic, an onstage mic and a few channels of playback, the sound reinforcement is quite complex. So the fact that we can do all the time alignment and EQ within a package as small as a QL console is fantastic.
"Reliability is obviously key and we've had zero problems. We switched the QLs on on the first day and, despite being used so heavily, we haven't had a problem with any of them. Not one single issue, which I think is a real testament to a new console," says Matthew.
"Everybody has been really happy with them. They're really intuitive, easy to work and simple for the crew to understand. We couldn't ask for anything more."
(Jim Evans)
