INDIO, CA – As rock festivals go, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has carved out a prominent spot since kicking off in 1999, serving as a showcase for upcoming summer tours. Despite being located in the middle of nowhere with desert heat that averages in the triple digits, Coachella is North America's first high-profile festival of the season, drawing more than 200,000 concertgoers over three days.
This year's festival was no exception. From April 15-17, the Empire Polo Field in Indio, CA, offered up a diverse mix of indie-rock, pop, and hip-hop acts, with headliners that included Kings of Leon, Kanye West, Arcade Fire, Big Audio Dynamite, Mumford & Sons, Lauryn Hill, PJ Harvey, and Duran Duran.
Audio for the festival was handled by Oxnard, CA-based Rat Sound Systems, which, together with Hi-Tech Audio of South San Francisco, provided 14 Avid VENUE Profile systems to cover FOH and monitor positions for the main stages and smaller tent stages. Of the 156 acts appearing at Coachella, only a small fraction chose to bring their own consoles, and many of those were Avid consoles as well. As Rat Sound's president Dave Rat explains, the VENUE systems were a logical choice on several levels.
"Our reputation rides on providing the clients with what they want," says Rat. "The majority of the performers at the festival specified the [VENUE] Profile on their riders, and several acts were bringing in their own Profiles, so it made perfect sense to specify them at the festival. Dependability was also a factor, with systems running 12 to 14 hours a day for three days, in temperatures hovering around 100 degrees."
[Avid live sound market specialist Robert Scovill confirms this trend. "We're seeing strong and continued growth in the adoption of VENUE among engineers-especially people who are very accustomed to and comfortable with an analog workflow," he says. "Particularly under festival conditions, where everything is very fast-paced and immediate, people want a system that's intuitive and easy to work with." ]
Another important asset at Coachella was the fully integrated Pro Tools|HD recording capability at each of the five main FOH positions. "Veteran FOH engineers Greg Price, Brad Madix, and I designed purpose-built Pro Tools HD 9 touring rigs, and were able to demonstrate to engineers how easy it was to set up sessions in a matter of seconds with the new VENUE Link feature," says Hi-Tech Audio's Louis Adamo.
Rat agrees: "It was great to be able to give the artists the option to record their entire set, and many of them chose to do so. "Overall the festival was a tremendous success," he concludes. "From Coachella management to engineers and technical staff, everyone was extremely pleased with how everything performed. Even though we are on year 11, we never take a gig for granted, and we are hoping we get the honor of being asked back again next year."
