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Wrap Up of the NetAid Concert
Three weeks after October 9, the word has spread around the world that NetAid, one of the most technologically ambitious live global multimedia projects staged in rock's 30-year history, has become a major success for the organizers who aimed to raise awareness and cash for the people of Sudan, Kosovo and East Timor with shows linked by Internet and satellite in London, New York and Geneva. The concerts served as the global launch of NetAid, a long-term initiative developed by Internet networking company Cisco Systems and the United Nations Development Programme, to help eradicate extreme poverty on a variety of fronts. Cisco, the major corporate name behind the three simultaneous NetAid concerts, underwrote the project's costs and led the development and co-ordination of its technology and marketing. Its primary aim was to encourage the public to log on to the www.netaid.com web site to learn more about the cause and, as a secondary aim, to encourage on-line donations through Cisco's E-commerce secure network which handled up to 1,000 donation transactions per second. NetAid says it registered a one-day record of 2.5 million Web stream hits from people world-wide on the day, and in the week afterwards reported that a total of US$20 million had been donated on-line to the cause. The event also marked a key milestone when more than one thousand philanthropic organizations signed up on the web site to become part of the ongoing NetAid project. "The tremendous success of the NetAid launch demonstrates the unique power of the Internet as a lasting resource," says Don Listwin, Executive Vice President of Cisco Systems. "With more than 1,000 non-profit organizations joining NetAid online, we've taken a significant step towards realizing the vision of creating a public-private partnership to connect the world. NetAid is not about fund-raising, it is about creating an ecosystem of people working together to fight extreme poverty, including debt relief for the world's poorest countries." London stars were The Eurythmics, Catatonia, The Corrs, George Michael, David Bowie, Bush, Bryan Adams, Stereophonics and Robbie Williams. New York's highlights included Sheryl Crow, Jimmy Page, Busta Rhymes, Counting Crows, Bono, Puff Daddy, Black Crowes, Sting and Zucchero. Among Geneva's top names were Bryan Ferry, Des'ree and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Live and Direct From Wembley - with Canegreen and Meyer Sound At the NetAid concert at London's Wembley Stadium on October 9, the first of the three international shows to go on-air live, UK-based sound rental company Canegreen was chosen by promoter Harvey Goldsmith and production manager Steve Allen to provide a unique Meyer Sound audio system for this landmark event, with sound designer Andrew Frengley and Meyer's specialist European SIM consultant Jim Cousins heading the audio design team. International producers included David Goldberg, Harvey Goldsmith, Ken Kragen, Don Mischer and Jeff Pollack. London's production team was headed by promoter Harvey Goldsmith, project co-ordinator Emma Cope, production manager Steve Allen, site coordinator Pete Edmonds, stage managers Steve Jones and Rik Benbow, LD Tom Kenny, set designer Tom McPhillips, sound designer Andrew Frengley, TV director Chris Cowey and production companies Canegreen, LSD, Screenco, Star Hire and Star Rigging. Mike Weaver Communications, Powerent and Stage Miracles also figured in delivering the audio side. Wembley Stadium, England's premiere sports stadium, was built over half a century ago and its limitations have long been recognized by both its sporting clients (Wembley hosts many of the UK's key sports events including the flagship soccer Cup Final) and by promoters of the handful of major one-off music events that are staged there every year. Recently there's been less musical activity, reflecting an overall downturn in European stadium touring activity. Soon, when the on-going and heated debate over architects' proposals for the new stadium are resolved - the hallowed venue and its famous twin towers will be torn down and a sparkling new high-tech 90,000 capacity stadium built on the same site, in time for the 2003 FA Cup Final. Wembley's first concert was 'The London Rock and Roll Show' in August 1972 starring Bill Haley and the Comets, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. It took another five years for a band to receive solo billing at Wembley - Crosby Stills and Nash in September 1977. Harvey Goldsmith promoted the star-studded Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for Aids Awareness on April 20 1992, seen live by 72,000 and on television in 73 countries, which sold out before the bill was announced. Wembley's musical landmark was the Live Aid Concert on 13 July 1985, driven by Bob Geldof to raise money for starving millions in Ethiopia and Sudan. Three years later, the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute Concert on 11 June 1988 was broadcast to over 72 countries. Other top crowd-pullers have included Celine Dion and the Spice Girls. But in terms of number of appearances, Michael Jackson has played more dates at Wembley Stadium than any other artist, and he has been seen by well over a million fans since his first shows at Wembley in 1988. If you want to know more about the stadium's plans, check out www.wembleynationalstadium.com. Networking NetAid Steve Allen, production manager for Harvey Goldsmith, says the concept for the global event came together back in February, 1999. It was around this time that the UK-based pressure group Jubilee 2000 seized national media headlines with U2 star Bono's speech at the Brit Awards to appeal for the cause of cutting the burden of third world debt. Thus, the technology of global communications became a major factor in an event's production. Allen: "We had to add another whole technological loop of dealing with the shows in New York and Geneva - linking them up with us and making the Internet access available at Wembley Stadium." He brought in Jim Baggott of London-based Tiger Productions as backstage and communications co-ordinator, whose major role was to install a distributed computer hardware and cabling network for the mega-stream highway around Wembley Stadium in the week before the show - "A gig in itself," says Allen. 20 terminals were located in media bars, hospitality suites, artist areas and other locations, linked via CAT-5 cable to Cisco's local server interface and thence to the World Wide Web. Cisco's distributed network architecture for the event used four separate networks for hosting text, downloading images, streaming video, and handling the e-commerce donation collection. In addition, multicast capability was available to Internet universities. The E-commerce side handled up to 1000 secure e-payment transactions per second with donations travelling over a secure network. Steve Allen says the schedule and line-up for NetAid was secured early on: "We didn't want people standing around in cold October weather, so we kept it down to seven artists at first and ended up with nine. Lots of other inquiries came in from other artists wanting to be part of it, but we seriously didn't want to increase the bill any more - we weren't trying to recreate Live Aid which came together in a unique way, when they took everyone on. We had to keep a tight control on this because of the live TV links with other countries and the weather factor." His biggest task - as for many others on the production - focused on the tight stage changeovers and synchronizing them with the New York and Geneva shows. With artists flying in and out and time zones intervening there were few chances to rehearse satellite links, presenter cues, VT run-ins and the live global Internet hook-up - so there was much busking on the night. Allen: "Getting the running order together and timing it to make sure we could fit everyone in was the big deal. It wasn't so much about what band should be where on the bill, it was about the best logistical way to get them changed around. It was pretty interesting - but everyone was very accommodating, and for me and for Wembley and Brent Council it was a very easy show given the amount of artists, people and infrastructure; and I really want to thank every contractor who contributed - they all did a great job." Sound Design: making Wembley work for the people Canegreen's Andrew Frengley designed a self-powered Meyer Sound system for the London show, acoustically fine-tuned to the resonant stadium by Meyer SIM specialist Jim Cousins. The rig included only the second appearance of Meyer's unique SoundBeam SB-1 parabolic long-throw HF devices at Wembley, provided by Rock Sound of Germany. The first was the Celine Dion in-the-round shows there last summer via Solotech. Noise spill is a regular problem for music events at Wembley Stadium, where the venue is surrounded by residential streets, and the local authority, Brent Council. The venue's difficult acoustics, which will hopefully be a thing of the past when the new stadium is built, are also well-known to touring pros. The underlying reasons for these problems have been tackled in different ways in the past, however, as Meyer's SIM specialist Jim Cousins will explain later in this article. On this occasion the NetAid team and acoustic consultants The Symonds Group - which liaised between the venue, the production office and Canegreen on all matters relating to environmental noise control - ensured that stipulated levels (set at 103dB SPL at the FOH desk) were met both inside and outside of the venue to widespread satisfaction. Symonds' Jim Griffiths echoed the sentiments of stage supplier Star Hire's Roger Barrett who commented, "Some people say Wembley Stadium is a difficult venue to work in, but we have an excellent relationship with them and both sides recognize that there's a lot of mutual experience. Wembley's attitude assisted a pretty smooth run-up to the show despite the technical challenges that all production departments faced." These challenges included the largest-ever audience area for a Wembley Stadium show, the logistics of the multi-media simulcast, 15-minute stage changeovers - some involving large band line-ups, and high expectations surrounding the world's biggest international charity rock bash in many years. The Sound System Canegreen provided a festival-style A/B control system both on stage and at front-of-house (dubbed 'George and Mildred' by the crew). Says Frengley, "We worked with a vertical column PA configuration with The Corrs and developed it from that for NetAid. The stipulation that production imposed on us was that we could only use one delay position, directly behind the mix tower, for sightline reasons. We filled in by using the Wembley house system, which is run very well and works very well, to help carry the sound into specific areas in the bleachers. The main objective was just to provide enough power to fill Wembley without causing spill problems." The system was configured as vertical columns to provide maximum control over dispersion. Six Meyer Sound MSL6 and 35 MSL4s were stacked either side of the stage, complemented by two infill clusters of three MSL4s and a center fill of two MSL2s, placed in a central block of 29 Meyer 650-R2s sub-bass. The outfield delay used just eight MSL4s hung in a tight four wide by two deep cluster off the back of the mix tower. Flown from Star Hire's cantilevers over the LED screens were three Meyer SB-1 SoundBeams either side, projecting HF to the farthest high seats. The tuning process was helped by Jim Cousins' SIM expertise which enabled precise system EQ'ing in the shortest possible time, as well as real-time adjustment once the audience was in and the show running. Adds Frengley, "The real trick was the organizational challenge of getting the bands through. It wasn't like a normal leap-frogging festival situation, where you get 40 minutes while an act is on plus changeover time to deal with the next artist's setup. Cutting performance times to 20 minutes makes a phenomenal difference to what you're doing." Alongside him were sound crew boss Peter Hughes, FOH engineers Max Bisgrove and Snake Newton, with Brandon Reece leading the stage audio team of Seamus Fenton, Chris Peters and Paul Myers; the line system was run by Richard Martin, Paul McCorley, Graham Devenish, Stuart MacKillop and Paul Knight. Canegreen's lineup was completed by RF specialist Damion Dyer. Says Bisgrove: "The real work for us was the organizational side - the team work, with everybody knowing exactly what their role was." The stage used Midas Heritage desks; George Michael supplied his own monitor and line systems including nine in-ear systems, while Bowie brought in his own Heritage and racks. Bryan Adams brought in a 24-channel ATI Paragon monitor console but used Canegreen's 'house' system of five Shure and one AKG hand-held radio mics and in-ear systems. Canegreen also engineered a large comms system using headset mics and in-ears for roving crew and Meyer loudspeakers at the console positions. The BBC's OB trucks took 96 splits via their Innova Son Muxipaire digital multicore system. Out front were a pair of Midas XL4s with a Yamaha serving a master routing console. There were fewer variations on the standard set-up here, but Dave Bracey, engineering for Robbie Williams, brought in the singer's touring racks. The results of all this were impressive, with a clear and dynamic sound from a minimally-sized system, and the SoundBeams established themselves as a real solution to a well-known acoustical problem. Catatonia's front-of-house engineer Helen Garrett commented after their set: "We've introduced a lot of different instruments and the set goes from acoustic to pop to rock, so it changes a lot during the mix; and while the band wants their live sound to be similar to their album sound, they're happy for a dynamic live representation." On tour she's used various systems - but never, until now, a Meyer Sound PA. She comments: "It sounds very good... one thing I was really impressed with during soundchecks was how far it seems to throw, and the fact that the crossover between the delay system and the main system is practically unnoticeable. Very often outdoors the main system starts to fade away and then you get this huge delay system kicking in; I was very impressed - I had to walk backwards and forwards a few times to have a listen." George Michael's engineer Mike 'Privet' Hedges had the largest task of the day in mixing almost 80 people including the choir - and did an excellent job. Michael's set was one of the real highlights of the day, and included a beautiful rendition of Brother Can You Spare A Dime?. "It was quite a large band to be mixing under these circumstances," he says, "but we had quite a lot of rehearsals, and everyone's had a sound check so it's a level playing field. George sang for the first time at a rehearsal on Thursday evening; then we took the desk straight out of [London rehearsal studio] Music Bank and brought it down here. George is a really great singer; he's very professional and in totally control of the singers and dancers and the overall feel on stage. This is the first time I've worked for him; he was only playing five songs and a lot of them are different arrangements to his album sound. He experiments with the arrangements and identifies what he wants to hear, and as far as I can tell in the short time I've worked with him, I think his music to him is very fluid and the versions of Freedom and Father Figure, were kind of drawn from the 'unplugged' version - they had a bit of brass and acoustic guitar. He just likes to change things around a little; he's not demanding, but he knows exactly what he wants. "It's not very often you see a Meyer System in Wembley Stadium, but I really like it; I used it on Neil Fynn and Mike And The Mechanics in theatres, and I love it in those rooms. The SoundBeam speakers are fantastic; with Mike and the Mechanics we supported Celine Dion and they had them in the round and were firing them to the long end of the stadiums and you could hear it as clear as day; they are pretty amazing for the long throw. Their fidelity is really fantastic and it saves having to rig loads of delays, and on Celine, for instance, the schedule was so tight that there really wasn't time for any of that so they really are a great bonus. It's better than sticking horns together and hoping it will carry!" David Bowie's FOH engineer was happy after the Thin White Duke's wonderful performance: "It can be difficult to come into a multi-band show like this and get the mix together but the Canegreen guys did a tremendous job of putting the PA together and the SIM guy did a brilliant job too. The PA sounded really good to me; I had a bit of a low end problem at the beginning, but we worked it out. The Meyer parabolic speakers are tremendous. ...I'll just go anywhere with...the MSL4 - 6 system..." The SIM Factor Another factor in getting this system tuned so well to Wembley's acoustical peculiarities was Jim Cousins, freelance acoustician and Meyer Sound's long-time European SIM specialist. He explains: "My brief was to come along and do a little hand-holding - mainly because Canegreen were using the SoundBeams for the first time and I'd been already used them in gigs in Germany and Austria - and then to come in with a SIM machine and run SIM on a live show, a real world set-up at Wembley Stadium. Some of Canegreen's guys have been on a SIM course, but we haven't had an opportunity to really use it from scratch during a whole stadium show set-up before now. It's a combination of what Canegreen's guys normally do with their ears, common-sense and SoundWeb, and me measuring and tweaking - it's a joint effort. "The first process in setting up the system is to measure and balance any of the systems that are aiming at the mix position, for two reasons. The mix position is the reference for the whole venue so if that's wrong the whole venue will be wrong. Also, from a practical point of view, once you've got the front of house tuned you can do sound checks even if you haven't quite got the delays done. After that you move towards the front, to get the front fills imaging set up. "A lot of that had already been done by Andrew Frengley, who calculated it all during the sound design process, so we already had the figures and double-checked them with an architectural measuring device - and then I triple-checked them with SIM on-site. "The next step was to move out and set the back-of-tower delays. We were also dealing with the house system, because we had a delay on the front-of-house, left and right, to try and get some imaging back to the stage, and we obviously also had to translate that into delays for the in-house system as well. We added the SoundBeams last of all - that's the best method, to see where you're losing high frequencies with distance and just bring in the SoundBeams gently." He laughs: "Most people tend to use them too 'hot' to start with and then within a couple of hours I'll back them down to where they should be. It's not that complicated; it's really a case of common-sense: start at the mix position and work outwards taking measurements at various points. "With a column system it's quite easy because you tend to get a very good, consistent coverage with both distance and height. Where you need SIM is really to set delays accurately and to also balance all the different systems so that they're tonally matched; you don't hear great changes as you go from one section to another. "It's also a question of tonally balancing the column of MSL-4s with the long-throw arrangement of MSL-6s on top of it - and the same with the rear delays and, eventually, with the house system. That's what we've been doing - just balancing it all out. "You can do it by ear, using a radio; but where SIM is very, very useful is in the situation where you've got something that you know is slightly wrong, but you can't quite figure out what it is. SIM zooms into the problem, and you can figure out: oh yes, it's the delay offset, or it's some kind of reflection. Or, for instance, with this show we've got to allow for the fact that there's a big, flat hard plastic floor laid across the pitch which means that when the crowd comes in the acoustic nature of the space is going to change dramatically. SIM allows us to take that into account, because we know what the reflective delay is and we know how that's going to affect the frequency response. So we won't go charging in and EQ that out, knowing that the EQ would be too much when the crowd comes in. "It's the same scenario with the bleacher seating. When the stadium is empty the plastic seats act as a huge, diffuse reverb - plus echoes in some areas - and you have to be aware of that and know how it's going to behave. It would easy just judge it by ear and feel that it's 'a bit middly', when in fact most of that midrange is coming back off the seats at you; so you have to be careful. "The crowd will change the reflections, but when we're using SIM we can actually lock into the direct sound. At low frequencies the reflections will be within a few wavelengths so we'll get those as well. But in the mid and high frequencies we can actually look at the direct sound, and then we can switch to RMS averaging and look at direct sound plus the building. "We do two types of measurement: the first is vector, which essentially causes diffuse reverb to cancel to zero, which means that if you're in a live venue you are tending to be biased towards the direct sound from the loudspeaker cluster. And then if you switch to RMS, the RMS basically adds the direct and reverb together, so you can see the effect of the empty venue and allow for that when you're assessing it. "Today, for instance, there'll be some times during the day - particularly with a loud mix - where it will start to sound very harsh, and we have to be very cautious about that because we know that a lot of that harshness is off the plastic flooring and seating and will disappear when the crowd comes in. "Then on show day, when the crowd is in, we'll be monitoring it with SIM and comparing the measurements with the curves we took today to keep it consistent. The idea being that between soundcheck today and show day tomorrow we don't have too many differences: obviously the reverb's going to be different, but at least the frequency response across the various system elements will be as near as we can get it." The benefits of SIM, then, are greater accuracy and elimination of some of the 'manual' processes in setting up the whole system. Adds Jim Cousins: "You can do a good job by ear, of course, if you've got good ears, and most people do a very good job by ear. But what SIM does is get you very quickly to a solution if you've got an area that sounds swimmy and strange and you don't immediately know why. It helps tune you back into common-sense. And when you see it on the machine's display you can always then go back and say, 'Well, I knew that anyway"; it acts as a constant reminder of what you're doing. "For instance, today we had to put the subwoofers along the middle front of the stage, which means that as you go round to the sides of the stage they then become out of time with the main system; plus you're getting a planar array with subwoofers which is causing a slight cancellation. So we've curved the sub arrays slightly - we couldn't go further out because of camera positions and other factors - and then we've set the time arrangement between the main clusters and the subwoofers to get good coverage out to the side seats without destroying it at the mix position. It's always a compromise - getting the best result that you can." From Jim's perspective, the SoundBeams make a big difference to a stadium system: "They're essentially a parabolic reflector, so they're very highly directional with a sound beam of between 8 and 10 degrees. Because of that there aren't a lot of sources coming from slightly different places that are going to add or subtract with each other. So SoundBeams are particularly good at throwing high midrange and high frequencies out to long distances without deafening people at the front. And because you haven't got multiple horns phasing with each other, you also get more consistent performance under windy conditions. But unlike a column, you've also got some control over horizontal coverage because you choose how many SoundBeams you put in and which ones you switch on - and you can tailor the levels of each one. Whereas with something like a single, wide horizontal column, you've got control in the vertical plane but you've got very little control in the horizontal. "The SoundBeams are pretty flat up to 10k out to around 200 meters, which is a very difficult task to achieve with anything else. We run the high end of the main system as normal; and we use the SoundBeams to cover the high distances of the bleachers." "If there wasn't a big crowd on the day then we'd turn the SoundBeams and the top sections of the MSL-6s down, but it seems like it's a sell-out so I guess we'll be OK!" He opines that part of Wembley Stadium's notoriety for its sound under the canopies is due to the way system engineers prepare for shows there. "A lot of that is down to how you set up the system, and I also think it's notorious because of the plastic seating and the fact that a lot of people come in here during the daytime and set up and EQ their systems with an empty stadium with all this plastic seating reflecting back - and when the crowd comes in you haven't got all the vocal range that you'd EQ'd out the day before." Canegreen and their self-powered Meyer Sound system, with the extra special contributions of SIM and the unique SoundBeams, produced a great result from a remarkably compact system in this acoustically tricky venue. It was a fine audio production to match a remarkably successful day for the international concept of NetAid. For more post-NetAid coverage, including commentary from the artists, please visit: www.netaid.org November, 1999 |
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