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iLive Family at Vienna Festival
A combined Allen & Heath iLive and iLive-T system was used at the recent opening ceremony for the prestigious Vienna Festival, held in the city's Rathausplatz.
The inaugural event saw the debut of a specially-commissioned composition exploring the emotions and depicting scenes that characterise Vienna and the kindred cities of Paris, Lisbon and New York, traversing musical styles including blues, classical, Portuguese fado, French accordion, and jazz and soul from the USA.
Having used an iLive-144 system to manage the FOH orchestra mix at last year's opening ceremony, festival sound designer, Adolf "Tucherl" Toegel, decided to use two iLives at FOH for the 2009 event.
A revolving stage was constructed to accommodate set changeovers for the many and diverse artists involved in the production, which included manoeuvring a grand piano on and off both sides of the stage. The blues band was permanently installed on one side and all the other bands were loaded on and off the other side.
"As there were two stages, I decided to design two separate FOH and monitor set ups for each side. Although there are digital mixers available that can manage the high channel count, there were quick band changeovers with announcements in between and also different sound engineers working for their artists, so two mixers was preferred," explains Tucherl.
FOH position was limited to 3.5m of space to house all mixers and FOH equipment, so Tucherl selected an iDR10 MixRack with iLive-144 Control Surface to manage the first stage, and the new compact iLive-T80 Control Surface with iDR-48 MixRack was employed for the second stage. To enable the stage to turn, all the microphone multicore cables ran through a hole in the middle and fed to the rear where the microphone splitters for the FOH, monitor and OB van feeds were located, as well as the wireless microphone receivers, IEM transmitters, and the two iLive racks.
"As well as the compact size, another major factor in the decision to use iLive was that the mix processing is separate to the mix surface, so we only needed to run CAT5 cable between the mixer and the stage," said Tucherl.
Last year, the EtherSound B output from the iLive MixRack was used to record the rehearsals, which together with a PC and a Digigram PCI EtherSound card using Nuendo, enabled Tucherl to record 64 channels of audio.
"The extraordinary feature on iLive is that you can switch all the inputs to the EtherSound B inputs and get exactly the same signals from the recording that you got from the microphones during the rehearsal. Since we did not have many rehearsals, we used this feature to create an accurate mix for the orchestra. Nuendo allowed us to loop complicated musical parts and optimize the balance of the microphones without the need to have musicians on stage," said Tucherl.
"I've been sound designer for the Vienna Festival opening ceremony for over 15 years, and I have used all brands of mixer. Both iLive systems have everything that I needed to produce a good show, the handling is excellent and the sound first class. In my opinion, a mixer should not have a "sound" but should be neutral and not colour the sound, so that only a small amount of EQ need be applied where necessary. iLive performs exactly this way, and it is able to manage classical as well as popular music. The surface is very intuitive, and you can configure the layout to access all inputs, outputs, groups, and DCAs with complete freedom to decide where you position the faders. On top of that, the colour coding on the LCD display helps to define the channel identity," Tucherl concludes.
In picture: Vienna Festival sound designer, Adolf "Tucherl" Toegel, at FOH with the iLive-144 control surface.
16th June 2009
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