There’s a movement going on in New Orleans, where many of the city’s crown jewel venues have sprung back to life after surviving the horror and carnage that was hurricane Katrina and then enduring the economic disaster that followed in her wake. And this aftermath was devastating to this city that thrives on tourism, where the damage to many of the Crescent City’s music venues left outsiders wondering whether they would ever recover.
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The British indie rock band Franz Ferdinand is currently packing houses in Europe, having recently completed its successful North America leg, with high-energy sets that kept the audience on their feet. The four-piece Glasgow-based band is comprised of Alex Kapranos (lead vocals/guitar/keys), Nick McCarthy (rhythm guitar/keys/backing vocals), Bob Hardy (bass) and Paul Thomson on drums and backing vocals.
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From an arts perspective, the Empire Music Festival is Guatemala’s biggest show. It was also the country’s first multi-stage festival. Primarily focused on electronica and dance music, it attracts artists from around the world. Held at the Guatemala Raceway in Escuintla over the country’s Easter-related national holidays on April 16 and 17, this year’s festival had three stages. The gargantuan 115-foot Main Stage was reserved for the biggest names on the global electronica scene; the Live Stage focused on various live acts, while the third Back to Basics Stage featured emerging and underground artists.
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Whenever Cher goes on the road, it’s big news, and this year — for her eighth solo tour — you can expect a big production as well. Cher’s current “Dressed to Kill” (D2K) tour, which promotes her Closer to the Truth studio album — is currently underway, having kicked off in March at the US Airways Center in Phoenix it will wrap up in October with two shows at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. Gross for the 63 mostly sold-out arena dates is expected to top $15 million.
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It’s been nine years since Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (August 29, 2005), killing more than 1,800 people and causing more than 80 billion dollars in property damage. To say that New Orleans was devastated doesn’t begin to tell the story. The catastrophe affected every facet of life in the Big Easy.
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Anatomy of the World’s First L-Acoustics K2 Install
History doesn’t always happen exactly where you’d expect it, which can be both exciting and unpredictable. So when L-Acoustics’ next-generation large K2 line array — which replaces its landmark V-DOSC with a smaller, lighter, more efficient design — made its world debut in a permanent installation application, probably no one guessed it would be in the small town of Valley Center, Calif.
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I realize that this may sound like Baker Lee’s column in last month’s issue (FRONT of HOUSE, May 2014, page 60) but that is only because great minds think alike, and maybe it’s just that season. So…
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Since the earliest days of professional audio, users have needed more output, coverage and frequency response than a single loudspeaker transducer could provide. Even with dramatic increases in modern transducer performance, it would seem that combining multiple drivers together, whether for response, coverage, or output will be a perpetual fixture of the industry. Because of the limitations of drivers, much of the effort in professional loudspeaker design has been expended in combining multiple drivers in a single loudspeaker box, and then combining multiple boxes together into arrays.
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A year ago, QSC debuted its PLD (for portable/live sound applications) and CXD Series (contracting/installed sound) amplifiers. Available in several power configurations, all are 2-rackspace, Class-D multi-channel amps with slight feature set variations catering to their intended use, but sharing a radical new channel-combining methodology, with flexible onboard signal processing as well.
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Veteran FOH mixers Greg Price (Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Van Halen) and Parnelli Award winner Brad Madix (Rush, Beck, Rage Against The Machine) have formed Diablo Digital (diablodigital.com), a venture that offers ready-to-roll equipment packages for live recordings. It’s also another instance of the kind of entrepreneurism that reflects an increasingly DIY live-sound business.
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Club touring presents many difficulties, one of which is the possibility that you can’t travel with your own P.A. system. Couple that with the fact that when the venue changes every day, mixing on a different sound system every night becomes a huge challenge. Your mix can sound totally different from show to show, and it’s tough to pinpoint the reasons why. Is it the console? The system processing? The speaker arrays? Here are some tips to help you stay out of the loony bin.
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As the title suggests, this month’s column is all about miking of your instruments, vocalists and/or choir to enhance the overall message delivered to the congregants at your house of worship. I am not concerned with what make or model of microphones you’re using. I do have a list of manufacturers I like and use myself, but this month’s column is not about those companies. I am more interested in where you place your mics and how you use them.
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