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AVI Brings the Sound of Integrity to Eastern Tennessee

AVI Brings the Sound of Integrity to Eastern Tennessee

This small town A/V company started with local church gigs and eventually landed one of the largest college concerts in the country.

The e-mail was unusual in that it came from an unexpected source. I get notes all the time looking for coverage of some show or another, but 80% come from the PR department of some audio manufacturer, while the rest come from someone at one of the big touring companies. Occasionally, I’ll get a call from a church or performing arts center looking for coverage of an install.

“I am very proud to announce that the small AV company I work for will be putting on this year's largest college concert in the country,” wrote Production Manager Rob Abercrombie. Had to be an overstatement, but he got my attention through a combination of humility (“how can we get a snippet in FOH?” he asked) and gonads (“or a cover story?”). I e-mailed back and told Rob how to send us info for a Showtime listing or perhaps a small news story. Then, as more of an afterthought than anything, he added that I could cover it myself if someone else were to foot the travel expenses. Small company, small town — I figured it would never happen and that I was safe.

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Pope Benedict XVI’s Massive Mass at Yankee Stadium

A sacred ceremony in a sacred place pulled off flawlessly.

Pope Benedict XVI came to America in April, and was astutely handled by the best, most experienced hands in the live event industry, from stadium rock to Broadway shows.

The Pope’s visit was a six-day series of events highlighted by a mass held at Yankee Stadium in New York City. It was the fourth in New York City’s history, but none of the previous events had as many limitations as this one. All the talent assembled and tools available had to make up for a considerable built-in scarcity: the lack of time.

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KSC Industries Digmoda Plate Amps with DSP Engine

Sometimes it is hard to figure out how to write about a company even when they make a really good product.

KSC Industries has been around for a long time, but chances are that while you have used their stuff, you have never heard of them. That’s because they are an OEM company. They make stuff that other companies put their names on and sell as their own. In fact, we are using stock photos here because I had to take care not to shoot someone else’s box while working with this new system. Again, OEM companies are very discrete about who their customers are or they don’t last long, and KSC has been around for 37 years.

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New Gear

Allen & Heath ZED 4-Bus Series

Allen & Heath has announced the ZED-420 (16 mono + 2 dual stereo channels), ZED-428 (24 mono + 2 stereo) and ZED-436 (32 channel + 2 stereo) mixers. Similar to the smaller ZED-14, the 4-bus series features the same performance DuoPre TM padless preamp, which is a microphone circuit and an optimized line input circuit, rather than one pre-amp handling both mic and line signals. It uses a two-stage design with carefully controlled amounts of gain in each stage, offering high headroom and a low-noise, clean signal path. The ZED 4-bus series has a responsive 4-band, 2-swept mids EQ with in/out switch, 6 aux sends (2 pre, 2 post, 2 pre/post), 4 sub groups, direct outputs on each mono channel, separate L, R & M main buses, 100 mm long-throw faders, 2 matrix outputs and a talkback facility to auxes or LRM. The connectors are placed on the top surface for easy plug-in and patching, and the construction, with individual circuit boards nutted to the top panel, is identical to Allen & Heath professional touring mixers.

www.allen-heath.com

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Keeping it In Your Face

Cubby Colby on great artists, great technology and a great crew

Fans of Saturday Night Live (I know you gig on Saturday nights — that’s what Tivo is for) will recognize the skits that all play on the “competition” between certain hosts for the record of who has hosted the show the most times. Here at FOH, it is pretty rare for us to feature an engineer in the FOH Interview slot more than once. I can only think of three: John Cooper, Big Mick and Cubby Colby.

Cubby is someone we could feature a dozen times and still not get the entire story. For those of you unfamiliar, the short version goes like this: Genesis and Phil Collins, Grammy Awards house mixer for years, more tours with Prince than any other mixer alive and a ton of other stuff.

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Enhancing a Cultural Icon

Bartlesville Community Center completes extensive audio system revitalization.

While Bartlesville, Okla., may not find itself included in the same sentence as New York or Los Angeles when one discusses performing arts venues, the city’s main cultural facility is at the cutting edge in every sense of the word. This vibrant community of roughly 35,000, some 47 miles due north of Tulsa, is home to the Bartlesville Community Center, a positively stunning complex designed to provide cultural and educational opportunities for the city.

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A Performing Arts Gem

Modesto has a symphony? Who knew?

The Gallo Center for the Arts is a shiny gem in the Central Valley of California, satisfying a need for performing arts in the Modesto community. The center, which opened in September 2007, is home to four resident companies including the Central West Ballet, Modesto Community Concerts Association, Modesto Symphony Orchestra and Townsend Opera Players. With two performance spaces — the 1,250-seat Mary Stuart Rogers  theater and the intimate 444-seat Foster Family  theater — the center is also designed to accommodate a variety of performances, from touring Broadway productions to rock ‘n’ roll concerts. “We’ve seen everything from symphonic and acoustic performances all the way up to Broadway shows and pretty much everything in between. We’ve seen ballet, contemporary dance, even break dancing,” says Brian Svoboda, sound engineer at the Gallo Center for the Arts. “It really is an answer to a call for performing arts in Modesto.”

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Berklee Renovates Historic Performance Center

New install for prestigious music school had to be “beyond reliable.”

It’s hard to imagine a room that sees (and hears) as much music variety as Berklee College of Music’s Performance Center. The space, the largest of five performance centers on campus, is host to at least 200 events a year, which cover everything from classical to electronica, jazz to hard rock, bluegrass to hip-hop, and even delves into the world of avant guard.

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Evan Lineberry and Robert “Void” Caprio

Evan Lineberry

Audio Engineer
Evan Lineberry Productions
Charlotte, N.C.
http://evanlineberryproductions.blogspot.com
704.241.7944
[email protected]

Services: Freelance audio for concerts, video, churches, etc.

Clients: A-1(audio for video), Black Enterprise Entrepreneur Conference, Charlotte Convention Center), MorningStar Ministries Healing Confer-ence (Fort Mill, S.C.), Elevation Church (Charlotte, N.C.), Upcoming gigs include the Asheville Music Jamboree, Ernest Leonard Ministries & the Cornelius Connection International Network Summit.

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A Trip To the Library

I take a fair amount of pride in my writing, so I was humbled when an audio engineer with whom I was working with told me he enjoyed my column in FOH and that it made for great reading while on the crapper. Although storing FOH in the bathroom — whether it’s on a tour bus, a venue or in an audio shop — seems totally logical, his comment, nonetheless, seemed like an underhanded compliment. My first reaction, after all, is that I am an author who writes words that convey lofty ideas. I articulate the inexpressible. I transmit cosmic truths to thousands of readers who hang on my every word — and this dumb schmuck reads my vaulted letters while sitting on the toilet. The nerve of him! OK, I’m humbled. It’s neither the first time, nor will it be the last time, and I’m sure I’ll recover. After all, humbling experiences are often a chance to reevaluate one’s perspective and grow past previous misconceptions.

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Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival

Three Days, Five Stages, 60,000 People, 100+ V-DOSC boxes and 19 PM5Ds

In its ninth year, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival — located in Southern California’s desert town of Indio, 125 miles east of Los Angeles — the king of the American alternative rock festivals took place April 25-27 with attendance reaching 60,000 on each of the three-day mega concerts.

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It’s A Family Affair…

When the first draft of the piece in this issue of FOH on the events surrounding the recent visit by the Pope came across my desk, I freaked out just a little.

Not because the writer had included frickin’ lighting info, but more because there was a crew list attached that was about three-pages long and included everyone who had even thought about working the gigs.

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