My final major project for the third year was as Head of Sound (alongside good friend Alex Pegington) on the annual 3rd Degree Festival which takes place in LIPA’s Paul McCartney Auditorium. It is a 2 week showcase of the final year musicians with 3 bands each night.

We loaded in the week before and set up the main FOH system which this year consisted of a pyramid stack of 2 d&b C7Subs and a C7Top a side. This was different to previous years and our main idea was to bring the HF lower down as the stacks were on the stage. We complimented
this system with an array of 4 C7Subs underneath the stage. Check out the picture below of the clearance between the subs and the stage - very snug!

The system sounded great and we were really happy with it – if I were to do it again in the future I’d say we ended up with the top-boxes a little lower than we’d of liked so would probably stack the C7Subs on their sides and stack them as a single line.

The three weeks were possibly some of the busiest I’ve experienced in this industry so far but at the same time they were the most fun and worthwhile!

We had some absolutely great shows and many people have said that it was the best the festival has been in years! Many many months of preparation went into it and I think the whole production team were impressed with how well it ran!

Many thanks to Alex and our elite team of 1st Year crew for all their hard work and to the rest of the production team for a fun-filled few weeks! I don’t think any of us could have done  it without the banter!! Thanks also to Chris and Ian from dBS for the 12-pair multi kit they lent us for the run – the changeovers became a lot easier because of them!!

So I’m just sat on a train back to Liverpool after a brief weekend back home in London (wellI was when I wrote this but it’s taken a few days to get it online!). I realised it’s the last time I’m probably going to make this journey before I finish my three years at LIPA! Crazy times… 

I figured I’d write a few posts about my other final year projects while I’ve got nothing to do on the train!

I’ve already mentioned Peter Pan which I did at the Lowry over Christmas. Next up was a production of High School Musical for dBS Solutions in at The Brindley in Runcorn. I was part of a nice small team of people working on the amateur production. The others were my good friends Ian Threlfall (sound and system design) and Rich Pomeroy (FOH Op). My role was as Sound No.2 for the week long production and I had an absolute blast doing it!

The week began with the build of the system. We all arrived on-site nice and early on the Sunday morning and whilst Ian and Rich set up the Ohm TRS PA, I got on with amp and RF world.

We were using a rack of 12 Sennheiser G3 receivers and transmitters with JAG headsets. I’d never used these heads before but was pleasantly surprised with the sound they produced when the kids started singing. There were 5 shows across four days.

We spent a couple of days teching the show whilst Rich got to grips with the backing tracks and script up at FOH. During this time I was busy labelling and sorting the RF packs and checking the plot to make sure we had enough packs to do all the changes required. Luckily there were only a few of these so the majority of the cast got to keep their packs for the whole show.

I had a blast and the kids were great to work with, very professional! Unfortunately, I came away singing the highly irritating tunes from the show – oh well!

Load out happened on the saturday night and all the kit was finally back in the warehouse by about 2am. All in all a great show – a big thanks to Rich, Ian and finally Chris from dBS for a great week! Check out a few pictures below…

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