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Mexico's Pepsi Tour: "Instant Concerts"
Pop music has long been an effective weapon in the worldwide cola wars, and this past summer Pepsi of Mexico leveraged the promotional power of hit music by sponsoring a series of free concerts featuring well-known Latin acts such as Kabah, La Ley and Aleks Syntek. Concerts were staged in a dozen cities around northern Mexico between July and October, drawing crowds averaging about 20,000 but topped off by an estimated turnout of over 40,000 for one show in Guadalajara. Produced for Pepsi by Uno Producciones of Mexico City, the Pepsi Live Tour 2000 aimed at making the music events accessible to the largest audiences possible while still keeping production costs under control. Accordingly, instead of renting large and expensive venues in city centers, the Pepsi Live concerts were produced in outlying parks, public football (soccer) fields, Wal-Mart parking lots and in many cases merely large open fields on the fringes of the cities. From a technical standpoint, this meant that the tour's production logistics essentially functioned as a self-contained, pre-fabricated "instant concert in a box." It worked like this: The morning of the show, two trucks pulled up into the empty open space. One semi-trailer, supplied by Stage Line of Canada, unfolded into the stage platform, complete with overhead canopy and rigging trusses for light and sound. The other trailer disgorged lighting equipment, instruments, FOH platform and delay tower, and the self-powered PA system by Meyer Sound. In most cases, rented generators supplied the AC line power. Within a matter of hours, the stage was set, temporary fencing was erected, and the empty field of the morning was fully transformed into a technically first-class concert venue. Compact, Reliable, and Exceptionally Powerful Uno Producciones contracted the tour audio to Audio Concepto of Mexico City, primarily on the basis of the company's ability to supply a complete Self-Powered Meyer Sound system. "They wanted a system with excellent frequency response, excellent overall sound quality and very high sound pressure levels," says Fernando Guzman of Audio Concepto, who served as systems engineer on the tour. "They also needed a system that could be set up and taken down quickly. The Meyer system was perfect on all counts, and it also proved very reliable throughout the tour." As configured for most shows, the Meyer system comprised left and right mid-high arrays suspended from outrigger trusses on each side of the stage canopy, with eight MSL-4s on each side. Underneath, per side, were five DS-4P mid-bass bins and five 650-P subwoofers, with three UM-100Ps serving as front fill. A single delay stack of four more MSL-4s covered the crowds in the rear. The stage monitor system was anchored by a contingent of eleven UM-100P wedges. The Audio Concepto crew on board for the tour consisted of Guzman (who supervised system rigging and alignment), monitor tech Arturo Cuellar and PA tech Alejandro Palacios. The Audio Concepto crew also contributed to the mixing chores, particularly for the local and regional acts (usually three or four) that opened for the touring headliners. Meyer Staffer Steps In When Kabah's regular FOH mixer ran into a conflict just before the July 29th show in Torreon, he asked veteran mixer Luis Quinones, now with Meyer Sound Mexico, to cover for him for that one show. Despite some logistical constraints limiting cluster placement, Quinones found that the system's performance exceeded even his high expectations. "It would have helped to have the clusters up higher, but that wasn't possible due to the structure of the truck stage," says Quinones. "But the overall sound was great even at that limited height. What really amazed me was the real deep punch bass, which you could really feel at front-of-house mix, fifty meters back in the middle of a big open field." The Pepsi Live tour is now history, leaving happy memories among the throngs of concert attendees-memories that presumably will affect soft drink selections for years to come. According to Fernando Guzman, "The general comments from Pepsi officials, the guest engineers and the general audience was that the sound was more than expected and it left everybody satisfied. All in all, the Pepsi Live Tour 2000 was a hit." December, 2000 |
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