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Forever European Rally, Malaga - February 2009

February 2009 saw Sound By Design back at the Forever European Rally, this year in Malaga, following 2008’s success in Budapest. It was clear from the outset when planning started for this event in July 2008, that this was going to be a technical challenge for an event that has grown in complexity over the past few years and was going to make the 2006 Nice event, where a helicopter was landed at the back of the stage, a positive walk in the park by comparison.

With the end client keen on going to Malaga, it was up to the production company to choose between a 5000-seater basketball court and an exhibition hall that could theoretically hold more, but no one knew for sure as it had never previously staged a live event. As Forever’s business was growing significantly over 2008, there was no choice other than to go for the larger venue, no matter what challenges this presented.

Following a site visit in August 2008, work began on concept design from all disciplines to see what was achievable. Independent assessment was made of the venue roof structure as a definitive SWL could not be provided, so to err on the side of caution, Prism Lighting came up with an extensive truss design combining flown truss and Tomcat ground support structures with in excess of 120 motors to help distribute the loads across the roof.

For an event that regularly sees an audience ambient noise of 105db, in a venue that had the acoustical properties of a large swimming pool, it was key that the PA design was able to focus the energy on the audience and avoid spill into the large roof void. With a combination of limited weight loadings, a trim height of 8m, poor sightlines due to the air-conditioning ducts and pillars in the middle of the room, Sound By Design’s Project Manager/ Systems Designer Dave Shepherd came up with a distributed line-array system comprising of 80 Meyer Sound M’elodie ultracompact high-power cabinets in 8 curvilinear arrays as a compromise of weight, size and SPL requirements.

To complement the flown system, 18 Meyer MSL-4s and 4 UPA-1Ps were used as front-fill across the three stages underpinned by a line of 21 700-HPs to create a uniform wall of sub-bass across the room. An additional 6 700-HPs were used as delay subs. This was complemented on stage with Meyer CQ-1s as stage fills, UM-1As & EM Acoustics M-12s for monitors, and UPA-1Ps as additional fills.

Dave commented: “With the UK market being exceptionally busy over this period for M’elodie, it was thanks to Meyer’s Roger Harpum and Dave Wiggins that we were put in contact with Fluge Sonido Prefesional in Spain to help source the 80 boxes we required for the event. I have been working with Meyer products for some years now, and it was one less headache knowing that we could source enough of the required product to make the system work on what was undoubtably one of the largest, and definitely the most technically challenging, events Sound By Design has ever undertaken”.

Taking charge of the FOH system on site, Sound By Design’s Senior Engineer Griff Hewis took on the role of System Tech for the event using 3 Meyer Galileo 616s as system management for the extensive rig with AES feeds from the DiGiCo D5 FOH console.

At the other end of the snake, Dave took the role of monitors engineer on DiGiCo’s flagship SD7 console. “Following last year’s event where two Digico D-Series consoles were used to get enough outputs for all the monitors, to now have access to the SD7 made the show much more controllable. With 112 inputs for the show, and a two-tiered main stage plus two satellite stages running 46 monitors and 8 IEMs across 36 mixes plus a feed to translation, the SD7 made light work of its role allowing me to concentrate on such a dynamic show that runs 8 hours a day for 2 days with no break.  In addition to the quality of the SD7 as an audio console, being able to have feeds from different cameras appear on the bridge allowed me to keep track of the 4 performance areas with ease”.

Sound By Design supplied 28 channels of Shure UHF-R radio mics for use as speech and vocal mics, plus radio guitars, basses and even drums. In addition to this, there were 8 Shure PSM-700 IEMs along with 25 wired and 12 wireless RTS comms systems.

The event proved to be another huge success and Creative Realisation’s Nick Shaw commented:

“Well now that the dust has settled, I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks for an incredible job that you did on the Malaga event. As you know, the client was delighted and I have had great comments from the country offices across Europe and testimonials from individuals alike – all pronouncing it a great success and a boost to their businesses.