Edinburgh Festival 2019

DeltaLive have been working with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for over 25 years now. We supply the sound equipment to all of the Assembly Festival venues. At the end of July, beginning of August we travel up to the ever-exciting city of Edinburgh. Here we assist with the audio installation of the 22 Assembly Fringe venues.

There are thousands of performances that take place during month of August, in a variety of venues throughout Edinburgh. The shows range from Cabaret to Comedy, Children’s shows, Music, Events, Exhibitions, Theatre, the Spoken Word, Musicals, Opera and Dance. Along with the Edinburgh Jazz Festival that takes place during July.

The Festival comprises four A-list venue operators, of which the Assembly is one. Six venue clusters in Edinburgh are looked after by Assembly. They include Assembly George Square Gardens, Studios, Check Point, Assembly Hall, Assembly Rooms and Assembly Roxy. Within each venue there are several performance areas and spaces.

This year shows in the Assembly venues included performances by Sir Ian McKellen, Eddie Izzard, Russel T Davies and Rose McGowan.

DeltaLive supply the sound equipment for the Assembly venues. This includes a selection from the product range of L-Acoustics speakers, subs and amplified controllers. Front-end control is provided by Digico and Yamaha desks with a wide variety of RF and wired microphones used onstage.

During the set-up we also spend time teaching the teams who will be using the equipment, how to use it. This is an excellent way for up-and-coming audio engineers to get some great hands-on experience. And is part of what makes the Edinburgh Festival such an exciting project to work on.

DeltaLive specify, in co-ordination with Assembly, a sound package for each venue, depending on the size of the space. The venues vary greatly in size, from repurposed containers to lecture theatres to Spiegel cabaret venues to the historic General Assembly Hall at New College.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival offers new engineers the opportunity to get hands-on experience. So, in terms of design, we offer a fairly generic package to each of the venues. The new engineers are then able to utilise the design within the space, giving them the chance to learn. Some acts may have particular requests though, which we also supply on a specific order basis.

Sound design is always incredibly important in a venue. Rather excitingly this year with the introduction of a new purpose-built seating bank for the Fringe Festival at the George Street Assembly Rooms Music Hall, the opportunity was available to revisit the previous PA system design. For this Sound Designer and Senior Project Manager, Mark Sawyer from DeltaLive, decided to deploy the new L-Acoustics A15 series. Largely because the A15’s are a new product and we wanted to ensure the most suitable system was installed in the space. “The A15’s sound really smooth, tonally, side-to-side and up and down. They are very even” notes Art Sereika, Systems Engineer at DeltaLive.

There are four main benefits to using the A15 speakers. They feature a high maximum SPL to enclosure weight ratio. This is a really big advantage as the lighter the speakers the better when it comes to flying the system, due to venue weight load availability. The A15’s also enable a reduction in amplifier count, using fewer amplifiers in a more efficient way. The design of the A15 includes Panflex Fins which can be opened out to change the dispersion pattern. This gives us an ability to steer the sound and change the coverage, specifically within the venue space. Finally the available cabinet dispersion angles mean that we can specifically cover the audience geometry with relatively few enclosures in each hang. This helps to eliminate potential site line issues to stage. Especially with the balcony elevation in this venue.

“I always love Edinburgh. It’s a good challenge to go to the different venues and get them each to sound as good as possible. Also, to meet the new and upcoming sound engineers” says Art. For Mark “I have personally had an involvement with Assembly dating back to 1996. As a warehouse tech prepping the equipment when DeltaLive was Delta Sound. To working the full festival season as a FOH operator in the Music Hall and covering as Head of Sound in 2011. I am pleased to have a continuing role with the development and advancement of this exciting and prestigious event, and moving forward into Assembly’s 40th year in 2020!”

DeltaLive
because experience matters

Feature image courtesy of Assembly Festival.