Juice at Marlborough Jazz Festival.
Marlborough Jazz occurs every July for one weekend, and Juice has been involved with the festival for the past nine years. Musical events take place throughout the town, but the major concerts (until last summer) have traditionally been hosted in the Memorial Hall, located on the Marlborough College campus just outside the town centre. In recent years main stage acts have included Jools Holland, Elkie Brooks, Humphrey Littleton, Georgie Fame and Geno Washington amongst many others.
This year 2004 was no exception with figures that were discussed of around 77 acts performing in Marlborough on the Friday night and as many as 92 acts on the Saturday daytime and evening. Working closely with the Festivals staff is a key part of this event, the whole event is run locally with volunteers with systems of operation that have been built up over the years. This means you have to maintain a high degree of flexibility and quite often read between the lines using the knowledge of this industry that we as a company have built up over the years, this has helped us to help the Marlborough festival organisers run the successful event that it is now.
Architectural.
Juice was hired to provide services for the Priory Gardens and St. Peter's site with additional technical back up for other sites, as the festival grew closer saw an ever increasing amount of equipment requirements such as the addition of the Castle and Ball stage, Ivy House Hotel stage and other single day or by the hour hires. The Priory Gardens site is a wonderful area to hold such an event and Juice took full advantage by providing powerful architectural up lighters to the trees surrounding the site and festoons of clear glass bulbs to light the main public walkways and access areas. Secondary to this main lighting standby lighting in the format of maintained fluorescent fittings were located on the paths and steps accessing the site and on each corner of the main marquee to act as audience guidance in the case of complete power failure.
Sound.
Juice provided Sound and Lighting Services for this site and power came from a hush power generator on site via 125a cable to the dimmers and then to the sound equipment via one of our new 63a three phase isolation transformers. Sound consisted of four ARCs, one horizontally mounted on top of each of four pieces of Telestage 2.4m truss stood vertically on floor stand and with our own mounting system which allows the ARC to be angled up or down to control the characteristics. One of these towers with an ARC on was placed either side of the stage and the second pair was placed one third of the way down the room to offer a more even coverage without running the system too loud. The system was controlled via XTA DP processors and the source material was mixed with a Soundcraft 328XD with two add on modules making it a 32 mic input desk with 10 line level ins, 8 sub groups inserts on each channel and two lexicon FX make this a truly versatile board. In fact the only extra was a dedicated digital delay line. The front of house was manned by Dave Wilkie and Stuart Tubman handled monitors on stage via Juice MB3 wedges 1 x15" with 2" HF actively via C-Audio amplifiers and BSS crossovers. A Soundcraft Delta 24 at 24 channels was in control of the stage with equalisation through EMO Graphics.
Lighting.
The lighting was to have been a simple system based around a rear truss to take into account the Apex of an "A" frame marquee with 32 1kw PAR Cans and supporting a black drape to hide the white rear wall. Along with this we were going to add five profiles to the front and a further two bars of six at the apex of the first frame. However, when we arrived the marquee was a gable ended with king poles that could not support anything. Our two lighting guys, Stuart Tubman and Chris Dales, quickly designed a new system that would account for this change in layout and the lighting was installed with 36 lamps on a front truss as high as we could get and a rear bar with just enough height to support a short drape to hide the ugly white behind and bring the focus onto the artiste. Specials were covered by five 1kw Lekos with a variety of break up gobos.
The lights were controlled by one of our AVO Lites 48 way racks with a new Strand 72 way DE-multiplexer that we are currently testing which, for the money seems to offer excellent facilities and a Jands Event Plus 48/96 desk with a HX400 DMX controlled hazer just to add that smoky feel.
Castle & Ball
The Castle and Ball Stage
One of those last minute requirements was for the sound at the Castle and Ball stage positioned in the beer garden behind the Castle and Ball Hotel with a continuous stream of artistes. The system was flexible and short throw with a pair of 2 x 15" front loaded box with integral 2" flare and a four way passive monitor system across four sends through a sixteen channel self powered desk. With a few bits of outboard this was more than enough for the acts and was a fun stage to man although with the sun it did get a bit hot!
Elkie Brooks and the Memorial Hall.
This the highlight show of the Festival and featured Elkie and Humph. If you have not already read and understood our section on the Memorial Hall it is worth reading as it upsets the guys who are mixing every time. Go to MEM HALL if you want the technical low down, but suffice to say Elkie's guy approached this with the same closed mind as many others but he managed to pull himself round and achieve an adequate job. Our chaps on this one Magali Couturier and Maxime Milani (He gets everywhere!) were on this on the Saturday and provided the four ARC array laid on the floor of the stage which until they fit a central hanging point is still the only way to cover this venue. Sound was mixed via a 56 channel PM4000 (wew! such a tight fit to get it in) via XTA DP processors along with the usual DBX160a comps, Drawmer gates and several top quality effects units. On stage was a Soundcraft SM24 with L'Acoustics FM wedges and SB115/MTD108 drum fill combination via Chevin Linear Mode amplifiers and XTA DP processors.
As expected the event was sold out and went very well.
The Marlborough Jazz Festival Crew 2003 (Click picture to
go to full size)