Nashville’s July 4th Event is one of the Nation’s Largest and Loudest
Apologies to the wingding producers at Macy’s and in the nation’s capital, but Nashville is pretty sure they had the biggest, baddest July 4 fireworks display in the country. They certainly have the best sounding. Now it its 12th year, “Let Freedom Sing” had the fireworks and the music to back up both assertions: more than 16 tons of explosives and 100 miles of ignition wire managed by a team of a dozen pyro technicians that took eight days to set up.
And of course, a top-flight lineup of music by Sheryl Crow, the Nashville Symphony, Brandy Clark, Maddie & Tae, Rayland Baxter and other artists backed by morethan 200 production crew and staff members, 26 truckloads of equipment, 144 speaker cabinetsand367 lighting fixtures, from a small army fielded by Morris (formerly Light & Sound), Bandit Lites and MooTV.
“Every year, it gets bigger and bigger,” observes Chris Lisle, a noted lighting designer who has been the project manager retained by the city for the last nine years. “Ever since Nashville became the ‘It City’ [a sobriquet bestowed on it by The New York Times in 2013], the event comes with bigger expectations.” In this case, the city had been forecasting as many as 250,000 attendees who would be heading to an event area barely eight blocks square, rivaling the 260,000-plus who set the record at the 2014 event. In a city whose total population is barely 660,000, these are significant numbers. “We are now a July Fourth destination,” he concludes. (The official police count of the 2016 event, which had to contend with periodic heavy downpours, was 134,000 in the main viewing areas, and “thousands more” in areas covered by extended video and audio.)
As the number of attendees increased, it began to exceed what could be accommodated on the riverfront performance area and its concrete steps that double as college-bowl seating used for previous events and concerts. Fortunately, last year saw the opening of the Ascend Amphitheater, a shed-type venue that seats 2,300 in fixed seating, and 4,500 more on the lawn, with a total capacity of just under 7,000. Even that’s just a drop in the bucket as the numbers approach a quarter million, but the Ascend venue this year became the hub in a multi-venue strategy that Lisle, the city and Morris worked out over the course of the preceding six months.
The day’s entertainment would commence in the afternoon at the Family Fun Stage, located at the plaza of the Bridgestone Arena five blocks down Broadway from the riverfront, where a string of local artists were booked to perform. At 5 p.m., the entertainment would shift to the Music City Stage, a temporary stage set up in The Green at Riverfront Park, and the Ascend Amphitheater’s Jack Daniel’s Main Stage, where headliner Sheryl Crow would close her set backed by the Nashville Symphony, which would then take over to provide the score for the real star of the night: the fireworks.
The Big Show
Each stage had a progressively larger complement of AV and lighting systems. The Family Fun Zone stage, the smallest location, had a P.A. consisting of eight E-V XLC 127 DVX line array speakers, eight E-V X-Line Xsubs and eight NEXO 45N12 wedge monitors, powered by six NEXO NXAMP amplifiers. FOH was through a Yamaha M7CL-48 digital console.
The Music City stage’s line array used 20 d&b J8 and eight d&b J-Subs powered by 18 d&b D80 amps and using three DS10 audio network bridges. A Midas Pro 2 console was used at FOH.
The Jack Daniel’s Stage at Ascend Amphitheater, the event’s main stage, used a flown system comprised of 20 d&b J8 boxes, 12 J12s, 32 J-Subs and 24 V8 enclosures. Other components included eight d&b V10Ps, and 14 M2 monitors, powered by 50 d&b D80 amplifiers and using nine d&b DS10 audio network bridges (seven DS10s at the main stage, including FOH, one in broadcast, one at the Music City stage to pass audio back and forth to Jack Daniels Stage).
It would be impossible for even a majority of attendees to have good views of both the music performances and the pyrotechnics, so the plan was to distribute the music via video to six key locations, three of which would have large LED video screens and stereo music. Initially, after crunching the parameters and other numbers in d&b’s ArrayCalc software, Morris’ engineers presented the city — the client on the project — with a plan that called for 26 delayed-audio towers, each with a specific complement of d&b J Series and V Series enclosures, spread over 13 locations.
However, budget and other considerations came into play. Working with the city, they recalculated and decided that they could achieve viable coverage with half that number of towers in six separate locations with each remaining one holding one or two towers of speakers with six enclosures instead of four. As a result, says David Graham, Morris’ project manager, they used nearly as much of their d&b inventory as they would have with the original plan, including 38 d&b J8s, five J12s, 10 V12s and 21 d&b D80 amplifiers. “We needed to cover considerably longer throws, so we had to add to the towers to get it,” he explains.
It was still an enormous undertaking, with three of the positions having both video and audio. Graham says the fact that all three of the main vendors, Morris, MooTV and Bandit Lites, are local and have collaborated numerous times helped tremendously — “We know each other by name,” he says of the various companies’ staffs. That level of cooperation helped especially in tight spots like the Ascend venue, where the lighting rig alone took up 82 feet of the 91-foot-wide proscenium opening.
Wireless Audio Feeds
The number of delay locations and the AV for them could have posed a significant cabling challenge for the event. Much of that was mitigated by putting most of the audio and video on networked fiber, with the audio embedded in the video between the Music City Stage and Ascend venues and out to the delay locations.
Three of those were hard-wired to the Ascend FOH position, which took in feeds from the Jack Daniels Stage and which was where a Midas Pro One console was set up as the production mixer for the show’s announcements. However, three other delay positions were considerably farther away at: Broadway and Third Avenue, at the City Hall, and at the Walk of Fame, across the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum between Fourth and Fifth Avenues but one very long block (the length of the Bridgestone Arena) from Broadway. Cabling between these locations would have been a gamble considering the enormous amount of foot traffic that would traverse them over the day and the night.
The system designers opted instead for a relatively new wireless solution, Neutrik’s XIRIUM Pro wireless audio connector network. The delay location at First Avenue and Broadway took AV signal on fiber from the Ascend venue and sent a split of the audio to the high-gain XIRIUM Pro transmitter that was mounted on a pole atop the tower, putting it nearly 20 feet above ground. It sent a continuous, uncompressed 5.2-GHz Wi-Fi stream that Neutrik advertises as full bandwidth (20 Hz to 20 kHz) with latency equal to three milliseconds, up to about one kilometer/3,200 feet line of sight, to the next location down Broadway, at Third Avenue, about 250 yards away. (Fiber was deployed as a back up to the City Hall location, 3,000 feet away, and was used for signal transport as the rain became more intense.)
The system can accommodate analog, AES and Dante formats; at “Let Freedom Sing,” it was sending and receiving analog audio signals. The XIRIUM Pro system will support as many as ten discrete channels of audio via five transmission units. On the receiving side, XIRIUM Pro supports an unlimited number of receivers.
At the Nashville event, the First Avenue location was transmit only and the Third Avenue delay location used both transmit and receive antennas, as well as repeater modules at Fourth Avenue and Broadway, an audio-only delay location that was also used to turn the corner on the wireless signal to send it south to the Walk of Fame audio/video delay location on Demonbreun Street.
Mark Boyadjian, Neutrik’s applications manager who was providing technical support onsite, says this was the XIRIUM Pro’s largest deployment to date. “We’ve had a few that have been a bit more complicated since it was introduced [at the beginning of the year], but this project covers the most square meters.”
July Fourth Ascending
The Ascend main stage was the hub for audio. FOH mixer Chris Clark had a 96-input Avid Profile for the Nashville Symphony, a 48-channel Profile for Sheryl Crow’s set and a third 48-input Profile for other artists performing there, plus the 40-channel Midas Pro One production desk. Between those and the 75 microphones deployed by the symphony, Clark was looking at over 200 inputs. “A typical festival day,” he jokes. In addition to mixing for the audience there, his mixes were also being sent to radio station Lightning 100 and ABC-TV affiliate Channel 2 for simulcasts, and to the delay locations as analog signal embedded in the video signal. They were also used for a streaming edition of the show.
Each of those additional feeds also had crowd and ambient sound effects captured through two Shure Beta 181s in cardioid mode at the console, pointed out towards the stage and two Audio-Technica AT 8035 shotgun mics at the sides of the stage pointed into the audience. Two more 181’s were added at the back of the venue to capture the fireworks noise. Audio came into his console from the Music City stage on fiber over a Dante network connected to d&b DS 10 audio network bridges. The Family Fun stage, over five blocks away, was on its own. The closer Music City stage, which alternated performances with the Ascend venue in he evening, became essentially an additional delay location once the symphony performance began, helping mitigate the budget-truncated delay-tower strategy.
David Graham says that the overall challenge was getting audio (and to a lesser extent, video) distributed to an audience that fragmented by an urban landscape. “Visibility and access were severely limited,” he explains. The solution to deploy multiple, powerful delay positions was the right one, offering a kind of crowd self-control by giving them options, to try to get in closer to the performance stages or enjoy the music remotely. Either way, they all got to see the fireworks.
“We gave as many people as much access to the entire event as possible,” he says. “Considering things like the size of the crowd, the weather and issues like security, it was the way to go.”
