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Shure Wireless Systems Help Grammy Performers Hear and Be Heard

News

Courtesy of Front Of House Online 

Axient Digital microphone systems and PSM 1000 play key roles in 2018 Grammy telecast

NILES, IL., February 12, 2018—The 60th Annual Grammy Awards, broadcast live on CBS, brought its usual array of mash-ups, tributes, and stunning performances of the best in music to New York’s Madison Square Garden and a global television audience. Shure wireless microphones, in-ear monitor systems, and hardwired mics played a key role in ensuring flawless audio throughout the three-hour celebration of Music’s Biggest Night.

A seasoned crew of professionals led by Audio Coordinator Michael Abbott teamed up to meet the show’s substantial sound requirements, with Firehouse Productions supplying the audio, RF and communications gear, while Music Mix Mobile brought two full recording trucks for 5.1 surround music mixing. As always, the Grammy team encouraged all performers to use their preferred vocal microphones.

To meet the challenge of delivering enough channels for the ambitious, dual-stage production, RF Coordinator Vinny Siniscal used Shure Axient Digital as the default wireless microphones for artists on stage, as its spectral efficiency permits more channels in less available spectrum than any analog system. The other key need is for highly reliable in-ear monitoring. As has become common practice on all major award shows, 24 channels of Shure PSM 1000 delivered flawless sound to the performers on both stages.

The night’s big winner, Bruno Mars, used an Axient Digital handheld for his vocals. So did Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee in their performance of “Despacito.” The system was also central to several of the show’s signature events, including a Beta 58A version for the Chuck Berry tribute by Gary Clark Jr. and SM58 capsules for “Tears in Heaven,” featuring Maren Morris, Brothers Osborne and Eric Church.

“This was the first live to air show we’ve done with all digital mics, and this is a high-channel count show. I like the way Axient Digital performs; the RF performance is solid,” reports Siniscal. “I especially love the rechargeable battery technology. The long battery life and ability to monitor the battery status gives us confidence throughout the show.”

One of the night’s biggest highlights was Kesha’s impassioned performance of “Praying,” addressing the issue of sexual abuse in society and the music industry. Kesha used her usual Shure UHF-R handheld wireless, while backing vocalists Andra Day, Cyndi Lauper, Julia Michaels, and Camila Cabello used Axient Digital systems with classic SM58 mics.

Other performers on Axient Digital included Bono, Little Big Town, Childish Gambino, Logic, Shaggy, DJ Khaled, Broadway stars Patti Lupone and Ben Platt, Khalid, Dave Chappelle, Alessia Cara, and SZA.

The Grammy Awards boasts a deep, experienced crew of mix engineers, with Tom Holmes in the main production truck delivering alternating mixes from Eric Schilling and Jon Harris in the M3 trucks. For the live mix inside Madison Square Garden, Ron Reaves handled the music mixes, with Mikael Stewart in his accustomed role as program mixer. The two stages each hosted one monitor console, with those mixes performed by Tom Pesa and Simon Welch, who was pleased to see the PSM 1000 in place.

“The PSM 1000 RF front end is the best in the industry; you know when you are driving it hard you won’t have any issues,” notes Welch. “The Cue Mode feature is invaluable for run-and-gun shows like this.”

Shure’s dominance in wireless even extended outside Madison Square Garden. All wireless microphones used on the red carpet for pre-broadcast interviews were UHF-R with KSM9 mic capsules, and Axient was U2’s choice for vocals, bass and guitar wireless in their pre-taped performance at the Statue of Liberty.

“We knew going into the Grammys this year was going to be challenging, especially trying to coordinate wireless frequencies in one of the biggest cities in the world,” says Shure Artist Relations Manager Cory Lorentz. “Shure wireless, especially Axient Digital, played a much larger role in this year’s show, and we were ecstatic to see the huge channel count on hand to make such a large production run smoothly.”

Behind the Scenes of the Grammys’ Sound

News

Courtesy of Anthony Savona via Pro Sound News

It takes a battalion of audio professionals to make sure Music’s Big Night goes off without a hitch.

During sporting events, the prestigious Madison Club at Madison Square Garden gives season ticket holders all the amenities of a luxury box experience, including a large lounge, a private club bar, and personalized suite-level seats. However, for music events, the space is used as Backstage and is blocked from the action by giant black curtains, so while patrons can’t take advantage of it, enterprising sound crews can. For the 60th annual GRAMMYs, held in New York City for the first time in 15 years, the Madison Club was turned into Sound Central, holding monitor mixers, Pro Tools rigs, cabling, and all communications hardware for the mega-event.

“Instead of trying to smash the volume of gear that we have [in the Madison Club] backstage—with all the risers moving around and trying to stick us underneath something—we took over the entire Club, which is about 120 feet wide by 20 feet deep,” states Firehouse Productions Project Manager/Sound System Designer Mark Dittmar (Red Hook, NY). “It allowed us to get everything that we want to do in neat 11-foot wide sections, and it gave us an awesome work area. We’re out of everybody’s way. It is longer cable runs for us, but we build infinitely faster because you can do it once and not have to touch it or move it again.”

For the GRAMMYs, the Madison Club’s two coat-check rooms, at opposite ends of the club, each housed an Avid Pro Tools rig, with the one on the left handling sound for stage left and the one on the right handling stage right. Next to the left Pro Tools rig were all the hardwired communications for the show, followed next by the wireless communications; able to accommodate up to 1,024 channels, the team (thankfully) used about 60 channels going to 300 destinations.

And in a space as dense as the Garden in NYC, there was more to worry about than sharing frequencies. Dittmar explains, “The problem the wireless communications team had to deal with from the start is, when you turn on two frequencies, harmonics are made into modulation distortion, which creates other problems. So for every channel, we have to calculate out the third harmonic to keep some space between frequencies—100 transmitters could have 800 harmonics!”

Next to Communications was Split World, where all audio came in and went out, with feeds coming in/going out for front of house, music trucks and the broadcast trucks. “It all comes in here via fiber,” says Dittmar, “It all gets split up via analog and it all gets shipped out via fiber. That gives us a heck of a lot of redundancy, so the single points of failure don’t take you down.”

Across the way sat a rack of preamps for the music, and the person responsible for running them, engineer [and longtime PSN reviewer] Russ Long. “We have over 200 inputs coming in off the stage,” says Long, “so I set those levels right when they come in off the stage. The conversion from analog to digital happens here, as well.

“We have two MADI streams that feed the two mix trucks, so both music mixers [John Harris and Eric Schilling] have access to all the inputs. We use the Grace m802 preamps for mic level inputs, and then we use the Aphex for line-level inputs, which are the wireless RF and the Pro Tools outputs.”

Rounding out the space were places for guest monitors mixers, including those working for Pink, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars and Elton John.

Down in Front

Far below the Madison Club at front of house was a sound reinforcement system with a Yamaha PM10 production console and DiGiCo SD7 music mixer at its nucleus. The house, filled for the evening with Recording Academy members and golden-eared producers, had sound provided by Firehouse Productions, which provided JBL VTX Series technology, including V25s for the mains, S28s in cardioid arrays for the subs and G28 subs on the ground.

The updated Garden added a new wrinkle to the sound system: a lower hanging scoreboard that had to be accommodated. “The scoreboard here is one of the most challenging things to deal with,” says Firehouse’s Dittmar. “That’s a new trim height that is a lot lower, which is why the PA is as wide as it is. But, from an audio standpoint, that makes it an incredibly challenging room to cover without splashing huge amounts off the side of the board, where we have nine delay clusters going around at the upper levels.”

Ron Reaves mixed the PA for the musical acts during the show, which he has done for many past GRAMMYs—experience that came in handy when dealing with marquee-level acts. “A lot of these guys are our friends that I’ve known forever,” he says. “We’re here to help them, so whatever they tell us to do, we do it. I always equate it to producing records: You tell me what you want and I’ll spin the knobs.”

Each act had a representative stay with Reaves at FOH, but he was the only one who worked the board. In addition to each act’s guest, Reaves had additional help from legendary engineer Leslie Ann Jones. “Leslie is the GRAMMY Award Telecast Advisor of House Audio,” says Reaves. “If we have some overzealous guests, she runs interference for us. She has incredible ears; she’s the volume police. She is an integral part in this team.”

Truck Stop

Outside the Garden, up against the famed arena, were the large Denali broadcast trucks and two smaller Music Mix Mobile (M3) trucks. Each M3 truck has an identical interior setup and its own music mixer, with Eric Schilling in one and John Harris in the other. The two mixers divided the evening’s music performances between themselves, as they recorded the rehearsals; brought in the artist or a representative to go over the rehearsal and create snapshots for the show; and later mixed the performances during the live broadcast.

The saved settings from the rehearsals provided a jumping off point for the live show. “I’ve got the static saved,” says Harris, “and I can get the song to where everybody likes it. I go to the top and say, ‘Well, this starts here with that guy up, the guitars panned over there and this guy over here,’ and that’s where I’m starting out. That’s where I’ll save it.”

But even with the start saved, there are many more moves to consider once a song begins. “We have notes,” says Harris, “but it’s all pretty analog notes—even with all of this technology.”

All Ears on You

As one can imagine, there is a lot of pressure when running sound for a room filled with top-level audio professionals. “This is probably the most heavily scrutinized I am all year because everybody here is either a record producer or engineer, and they are all listening to all the little subtleties,” states FOH mixer and GRAMMY veteran Reaves. “To me, that’s fun!”

JBL by HARMAN Delivers Pristine Live Sound at the 2016 Tony Awards

News

Courtesy of JBL Professional 

NEW YORK CITY— Firehouse Productions deployed a JBL by HARMAN VT4886 system to provide the highest quality live sound at the 2016 Tony Awards. The 70th annual Tony Awards was broadcasted live from the historic Beacon Theatre in New York City, and Firehouse Productions selected the VT4886 for its ability to deliver exceptional sound quality with an extremely compact footprint.

Firehouse Productions deployed a JBL by HARMAN VT4886 systemto provide the highest quality live sound at the 2016 Tony Awards. The 70 annual Tony Awards was broadcasted live from the historic Beacon Theatre in New York City, and Firehouse Productions selected the VT4886 for its ability to deliver exceptional sound quality with an extremely compact footprint.

“The JBL VT4886 offers an incredible amount of power and control in a very small package, and I’ve had excellent results with it on numerous live shows,” said Mark Dittmar, Lead Design and Integration Engineer at Firehouse Productions. “At the Beacon Theatre, which is an extremely small venue, size and taking up less space are very important. JBL VT4886 is a spectacular-sounding speaker in a very small package, which is a great combination for a show like the Tony Awards.”

The 2016 Tony Awards ceremony featured energetic performances from the hottest shows on Broadway, including “Hamilton,” “School of Rock,” “She Loves Me” and more. With up to 30 lavalier mics on the stage simultaneously, it was important to manage gain before feedback and make sure the live sound stayed out of the on-air mix. It was equally important to deliver excellent dialogue intelligibility. Finally, it was important for the arrays to take up minimal space and be hidden from the camera sightlines during the broadcast.

“On a television show, we have to keep the PA hidden, but we also need great intelligibility,” said Dittmar. “The VT4886 arrays worked really well and allowed us to place the PA in a space that other arrays wouldn’t fit.”

The subcompact JBL VT4886 features a true 3-way system that is unique to the subcompact category, offering exceptional sound quality and the highest SPL output in its class. The VT4886 also features a low-frequency diffraction absorber that eliminates cavity resonance and cabinet edge diffraction effects, which provided Firehouse with extra control over feedback.

The VT4886 is designed to deliver high-quality reinforcement of music and speech in a wide variety of applications, including concert audio and corporate AV presentations of all types.

Firehouse Productions Invests Big in JBL VTX V25-II Line Array Elements from HARMAN Professional Solutions

News

Courtesy of JBL Professional 

JBL VTX V25-II system with upgraded waveguide helps world-class live sound company deliver best of quality and clarity for high-profile events

NEW YORK––In a move to enhance its already stellar reputation and to support business growth, Firehouse Productions recently added 96 JBL VTX V25-II line array elements, 96 JBL VTX V20 line array elements, and 24 Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers to its inventory. Firehouse Productions now has a total of 140 V25-II elements between their New York and Las Vegas offices.

Recognized as one of the most progressive and successful live sound production companies in the business, Firehouse Productions has long relied on JBL by HARMAN loudspeakers to produce events, like the NBA All-Star Game and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. The company recently deployed the new JBL VTX system at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas, iHeartRadio Country Festival in Austin and the BET Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta.

“We started working with a JBL VerTec 4889 rig almost 15 years ago and it became an important foundation of our business,” said Mark Dittmar, Lead Design & Integration Engineer, Firehouse Productions. “When we heard a demonstration of the VTX V25-II, we were blown away by the sound quality. It’s the most accurate loudspeaker I’ve ever heard.”

The VTX V25-II is a full size 3-way high-directivity line array element that includes a new 4th generation waveguide for improved long throw performance and wavefront control. The system’s revolutionary D2 Dual Diaphragm Dual Voice Coil Compression Driver dramatically improves the sound and performance of high frequencies, providing an extreme output advantage over conventional systems with significantly higher array power, reduced distortion, double the number of voice coils and more than double the power handling. This results in a dramatic increase in pure high frequency sound pressure levels in the same physical footprint with a 30-percent reduction in weight. The V25‐II waveguide provides better acoustic loading conditions for the D2 driver, resulting in 10 dB higher sensitivity above 10 kHz.

“JBL has been producing top-quality products for seven decades, and the VTX V25-II is another amazing step forward,” said Dittmar. “The dB increase makes an enormous difference. The great sound quality and coverage we can now achieve in an arena or stadium really gives the big spaces an intimate feel.”

Firehouse Productions Purchases 96 L-Acoustics K2 Enclosures

News

Courtesy of Sharon Paquette Lose via Front Of House Online 

Firehouse Productions’ 96 new L-Acoustics K2 enclosures stacked four-high on K2-Chariots

RED HOOK, NY – Firehouse Productions recently added 96 new L-Acoustics K2 enclosures to its inventory along with 36 LA8 amplified controllers housed in a dozen LA-RAK touring racks. Shared between Firehouse’s Red Hook, NY headquarters and the company’s five-year-old Las Vegas location, the K2 loudspeakers are already scheduled to be part of the L-Acoustics systems that will accompany Radiohead at Madison Square Garden. They’ll also support tours this year for Florence + The Machine and the “Rock, Paper, Scissors” double-bill of Peter Gabriel and Sting.

Having toured with many of music’s most innovative, genre-defying artists—Peter Gabriel, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and The Cure, just to name a few—TEC and Emmy Award-winning sound reinforcement provider Firehouse Productions is widely celebrated for its ability to help artists translate the complex creativity and sonic fidelity of their recordings to the live stage.

For many years, Firehouse has chosen to deploy L-Acoustics loudspeaker systems, especially K1 in recent years. Now, the company has deepened its commitment to the manufacturer with its recent February purchase of 96 K2 enclosures in addition to 36 LA8 amplified controllers housed in a dozen LA-RAK touring racks.

According to Firehouse Productions Director of Touring Chris Russo, the K2 acquisition will enable even more flexible system designs. “The K2 can certainly be configured into their own system designs, and they’re great-sounding speakers on their own, but they also add lots of new possibilities when used with our other L-Acoustics speakers,” he says. “Sonically, they’re a perfect match with the K1 speakers we already use”—that’s because the K2 is modeled on the K1 system design and rescaled into a 12-inch, compact and flexible format—“and a lot lighter, plus have total rigging compatibility with K1 and K1-SB.

“They’re also the perfect bridge between the K1 and Kara speakers we deploy. For situations where K1 is too large, K2 becomes the main speaker with Kara as fills, which is a very rigging-point-friendly solution for mid-sized venues. And for designs that K1 is perfect for, K2 acts as the right-sized support speaker delivering incredible uniformity with its bigger brother. In both situations, K2’s Wavefront Sculpture (WST) and Panflex technologies allow us to precisely control both the vertical and horizontal directivity for maximum performance and coverage with minimum noise pollution.”

The new inventory at the Las Vegas office will also help support Firehouse Productions’ corporate and entertainment clients on the West Coast. Recent projects serviced there with L-Acoustics systems have included corporate events for Apple, Google, Melaleuca and VMware, with K1 also being deployed on December’s 2015 Jingle Ball Tour featuring Demi Lovato, The Weeknd and Fall Out Boy, among other artists.

“With K2 in both our Las Vegas and New York inventories, we now have truly national coverage with L-Acoustics, and that’s going to help us and our clients tremendously from a logistics point of view,” says Russo. “Great coverage and great sound!”