Yamaha consoles bring fringe benefits to Edinburgh Festival
It's no exaggeration to say that if a piece of audio equipment can survive the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one the world's most popular and critically acclaimed cultural events it can survive pretty much anything.
Operating continuously up to 20 hours a day for an entire month is a stern test for any piece of equipment but, when it comes to mixing consoles, there is the added strain of minimal time for technical changeovers between what are often wildly differing shows.
Little wonder, therefore, that Yamaha digital mixing consoles featured in five venues run by Assembly, one of the Fringe's foremost show promoters.
"You honestly never know what you're going to get in a venue," notes Assembly's head of sound Chris Ekers. "Some companies bring their own engineer, some use our staff and all productions have different technical requirements. So the console has to be both reliable and very flexible. Digital has made our lives a lot easier - it's not as quick to set up in pre-production, but once it's there you know it'll stay there."
The Assembly Hall is Assembly's flagship venue, a 750-seat space which was briefly used for the Scottish Parliament while waiting for its purpose-built Holyrood building to be completed, and which this year hosted Assembly's most high profile productions. These included the press preview evening, Grammy Award-winning Soweto Gospel Choir, hard-hitting play Truth In Translation and dance spectacles Havana Rumba and Maximum Crew.
The venue features a Yamaha PM5D, with Assembly sound engineers Martyn Ward and Danny Higgott working split shifts to ensure that there is always someone on hand, either to aid a visiting FoH engineer or to mix the show themselves.
In all Assembly venues, monitors and FoH are both mixed from the one console. "We try to keep it as tight as possible, limiting the number of monitor mixes, etc. We have to be fairly tough on them because there are so many shows. If one company starts requesting a load of special facilities or additional technical features, the cost starts to escalate rapidly," says Chris.
"So our policy is to have a fairly standard setup in all our venues. If a company needs something out of the ordinary, we charge them for it. Often that will be enough of an incentive for them to go with the standard rig!"
Because of the tight turnaround times between what can be radically different shows, the instant recall of digital consoles makes the lives of the venue techs a lot easier. Indeed, digital is now becoming essential in some venues.
"Each company has a four hour technical rehearsal slot before the festival opens," Chris continues. "During that we set up the console and store the settings. Then when the shows are running, during changeovers it's just a case of recalling all the settings for that show. With just half an hour to change between one 25 input show and another, it would be really tough using analogue and having to re-patch manually."
Another major advantage is the onboard effects of the Yamaha consoles, with many shows (particularly in the Assembly Hall) featuring large amounts of microphones.
"For example there are 28 mics on the Soweto Gospel Choir show this year," says Chris. "Last year we had Jim Henson's Puppet Improv, which also had a lot of mics. So having the onboard gates and compression is crucial and it saves a lot of space. The footprint of the front of house area is always a big issue and racks for the outboard gear would take up too much room. The fact that it's all onboard the Yamaha digital console makes a huge difference."
Another Assembly venue which features a PM5D is The Sanctuary at St George's West, which is a church in its normal existence. Here the shows are even more diverse than at the Assembly Hall - ranging from the Japanese drummers of Aska - Lion Spirit, through Yellow Hands (an unusual mixture of video playback and live performance of bizarre instruments), Bigger Than Jesus (a hi-tech, religion-based monologue) to Welcome Back To The Hotel California, a Dutch tribute band playing the music of The Eagles.
Here the advantage of the PM5D is obvious, with such diverse shows a lot of different inputs feature during the 24 hour period. "We have all the shows set up on recall, but I don't have any scenes set up for each show," says Assembly FoH engineer Pam Hay, sharing splits shifts with Matt Coplan. "It's quite rock'n'roll, really, it's all mixed on the fly."
A smaller Assembly venue, featuring a Yamaha M7CL is the Ballroom. Here FoH engineers Holly Newcombe and Liam McGrath face a different set of challenges, including battling with a parabolic ceiling and a band with an ever-changing line-up. While there is only a certain amount that could be done to mitigate the former, the M7CL has come to the rescue for the latter.
"The band line up for the cabaret Belly of a Drunken Piano has kept changing," muses Holly. "Every time a band member changes we've had to alter the settings to take account of their playing style. But with the M7CL, we've been able to save all the previous mixes, so if a band member returned it would be a quick job to revert to their mix."
The play Exit and Entrances takes advantage of the M7CL's scenes facility, featuring many sound effects, all of which had different settings, while six piece accapella group, The Magnets used Show Control via midi to trigger scene changes and associated effects patches in a TC D2.
"A major advantage of the smaller Yamaha consoles is that they are very easy to teach," says Chris Ekers. "The Fringe is a major training ground for those with little show experience, but it's a relentless month's work. If a console is designed so an inexperienced operator can learn it quickly, it's a big plus."
An example of this is in Assembly's Rainy Hall. Previously used as a bar, the hall was pressed into use as a venue this year to host cultural receptions for various different countries. A Yamaha LS9 and a small PA were put in for background music, speeches and a late night radio-style show with comedian Jason Byrne.
Manning the console was local lad Hugh McKenna, who had no previous experience on the LS9 but found it very easy to learn during a day's training. Admittedly it's a low-key start for Hugh, but it's likely that next year he will have graduated to a bigger venue where he can develop his FoH skills further. It's a prime example of how the Fringe is such a valuable training ground, with its 'trainees' able to see visible progress year on year.
A second LS9 was deployed in Assembly's Supper Room, where Craig Gaskin and Robin Tearle were operating the console. Here the challenge was working with shows that were perhaps a little too 'big' for the room. And as an experienced analogue man, Craig was on a bit of a learning curve himself.
"Most of these shows use a lot of playback from CD and MP3 players, with a few mics for performers," says Craig. "So having the recall for each show is really handy. I also like the user-defined buttons on the LS9."
As the Fringe wound down after its traditional month of converting the most unlikely of spaces into performing arts venues, Yamaha digital consoles had played a major part in ensuring that the Assembly venues ran as smoothly as possible, providing high quality sound and a straightforward user interface for a remarkable variety of productions. It's this seamless 'fit' with the Fringe ethic that ensures digital audio will only become more essential for its venues, because variety is, of course, the spice of life.
