Prosound South Africa Supplies In The City

Set up in the beautiful and historic Mary Fitzgerald Square, ‘In The City’, aims to revitalise Newtown as the cultural precinct of the inner city.
Supported by top South African acts – Die Antwoord, Tumi featuring Yesterday’s Pupil, and Shadowclub – BLOC Party mesmerised fans with an 80 minute set of old favourites and new hits.

Prosound was commissioned with full technical supply for this debut event providing design, staging & structures, audio, lighting and large format LED screens, and under very tight time constraints handled all that was thrown at them with ease. 

Audio
The main P.A was made up of 22 Meyer Milo 90’s with underhangs of 4 Meyer Milo 120. Due to the influx in ticket sales the intial fence lines where moved, increasing the width of the venue substanitially. Additional out-hangs of Meyer Mica where introduced to provide even coverage across the festival area. With Meyer UPQ’s handling the front fills and immediate in-fill area’s - all supported by the Meyer Sound 700HP sub-bass loudspeakers.  Meyer M’elodie were flown for delay systems including the VIP and sponsor areas ensuring everybody was included in the festival! System management and signal distrubution to the various areas was looked after by Meyer Galileo 616 digital processors.

FOH and stage control for both support and main acts was via networked Midas Pro9 and Midas Pro2 mixing consoles. Using multiple digital stage boxes meant that there was limited physical patching between acts, ensuring clean, quick and easy change overs between acts.  Stage monitoring had a supply of IEM and Electro-Voice stage wedges for the artist requirements. “I've got to say the MIDAS console blew me away,” comments BLOC Party’s FOH engineer Dan Macbean. “We didn't have long to set up so it was kind of a chuck up mix and I can safely say that the MIDAS desk saved the show for me! Everything had that lovely Midas analogue sound straight away, which I'd kind of forgotten about using a plethora of other digital boards. It felt a bit like coming home and from then on the gig was a joy to mix.”

The network comprised the Pr09 at FOH with a DL451 for pre and post show DJ inputs and for remote feeds to the delay towers.  Onstage and linked to the Pro9 /DL371 were the DL351 and 2 DL251 stage boxes and the Pro2.  This meant that everything could be pre patched and band change overs in terms of inputs was a simple scene change on the consoles. “The entire event ran smoothly from start to finish,” adds Mark Malherbe, system designer and engineer for the show.
Staging

Due to the ever present threat of rain the decision was made to go for the Orbit 18m by 20m stage roof, this supply was handled by Prosound’s long time staging partner SS Stage Structures.

Lighting
The lighting supply was based on a festival plot with specifics for BLOC Party’s requirements. A large roof system comprising multiple moving heads both spots and washes, a dozen strobes and generic support from ETC Source 4 and the ETC Seledor range offering smooth intense color wash. We had a substatial floor pack made up of additional intel’s. Atmospherics where handled by a selection of Unique Hazer’s and Vipers. All dimming was via ETC smartpack’s. Prosound’s resident LD Daniel “Chenn” De Wet had the following to say, “A lot of people have huge misconceptions on rigging and lighting in domes, but if you follow the contours and apply your fixtures correctly you get fantastic results and depth in your rig”.

Donovan Calvert, Prosound’s Rental Division Manager, concluded: "We had a very tight load-in schedule and coming off back-to-back gigs we couldn't afford any technical issues, the quality and build of the equipment forwarded us 100% reliability, making the get-in and show smooth."

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