Team spirit
Published: ASIA
Sri Lanka is finally emerging from years of warfare, compounded by the 2004 tsunami which wreaked havoc on the island. One sign of the country’s new stability is the arrival of international touring musicians, including Greek artist Yanni, who paid a recent visit to the capital, Colombo. The event – the largest international indoor concert in Sri Lanka to date – was a co-production between Colombo’s Universal Sound and Indian PA rental and events company, Sound.com.
This was an unprecedented opportunity for Yanni’s many Sri Lankan fans to see their idol. In 2011 the artist hit the headlines when he made a brief stopover at the airport, so the news that he was coming back to perform sparked an interest, with tickets rapidly selling out.
Sound.com owner Warren D’souza was impressed by his first experience of working in Sri Lanka. ‘The country has a fantastic infrastructure for hosting events,’ says Mr D’souza. ‘Colombo is a beautiful, clean city with a strong cultural heritage; the traffic is good and getting around is easy. It was extremely smooth to get our equipment in and out of the venue.’
This was the Sugathadasa indoor stadium, one of the venues attracting international performances to the country. According to Mr D’souza, the Yanni concert was the biggest Sri Lanka has seen to date. ‘I think this event has given promoters a taste of how successful shows can be in Sri Lanka,’ he says.
Mr D’souza gained a great deal of event production experience working with Australia’s Norwest Productions on the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. ‘One of the things I learned from Chris Kennedy of Norwest is that whenever you work away from home, you should always synergise with the local company, because it will have local insight and knowledge,’ he says. ‘Chris and his entire team taught me that you should encourage the local company to be proud of and promote their involvement with the show rather than hush them up, and this worked extremely well. We worked together as neighbouring countries and partners, rather than it being a Sound.com or Universal project. The most important thing was the production of Yanni’s show.’
It was of paramount importance that both companies established their individual roles in working together, as well as collaborating with Yanni’s crew. ‘Universal’s role was to win this project, to provide the base equipment and ensure the safe entry and exit of all equipment in and out of Colombo,’ explains Mr D’souza. ‘Sound.com’s role was to ensure it was rigged, aligned and calibrated properly. We all played our roles perfectly and interfaced with Yanni and his technical team.’
Yanni and much of his production team are based in Florida, with the musicians coming from all over the world, including Greece, Armenia, Eastern Europe and Greece. ‘It’s a very large entourage, a huge community of people working on the project, and the first project where we had two systems engineers as well as one FOH engineer,’ says Mr D’souza. ‘Yanni takes two opinions about the show, one from his systems engineer and simultaneously, one from the FOH engineer. His systems engineer has as much input into how it should sound as his FOH engineer does.’
Universal, which had previously provided sound for concerts including Daniel O’Donnell, Billy Ocean, Olivia Newton John and Leo Sayer, is the only Vertec user in Sri Lanka. According to Mr D’souza, it is also one of the few companies in the country which currently owns a PA system of this standard, making it an obvious choice for the concert. However Universal’s system wasn’t big enough to cover the entire event, and the company needed a little assistance to handle a show of such magnitude. The company duly turned to Sound.com, being a Vertec owner of some repute based in neighbouring South India, with the necessary experience of handling large scale productions. Sound.com had but one major request: it had to be a co-branded effort and not a dry hire.
‘When I received Yanni’s production rider, I realised my inventory wouldn’t be sufficient,’ says Universal director, Malinda Lowe. ‘Moreover, I wanted to treat the artist with the best production capability we could offer as a Sri Lankan production company. Sound.com and its owner, Warren and I have been very good friends even though we had not done any events together in the past. I always knew that his company was very professional in the sound business in India and he has always been very helpful to me. I anticipated that he would support me with the additional gear that I required, and also that it would be a great experience for me to work with Warren and his company. I received great support from his side from the point of sending documentation to sending the equipment to Sri Lanka.’
Sound.com supplemented Universal’s Vertec PA inventory with eight VT4888 and 16 VT4887 line array elements plus Crown I-Tech HD DSP amplifiers, air freighted from India. ‘We knew if we were to do a show like this we had to do it with V5 processing, which was a prerequisite of Yanni’s production, and not available in Sri Lanka,’ says Mr D’souza. ‘We sent the equipment by air because of time constraints, and shipped it back by sea. It all went smoothly, with very little bureaucracy involved in getting the gear in and out.’
When it came to system design, the PA companies had to take into account that Yanni doesn’t like a lot of bass in his productions. ‘Because we were playing an indoor arena we knew it didn’t have to be that bass heavy, so we used VT4882 double loaded 15 subwoofers,’ he continues. ‘The most important thing in the system design was getting vertical coverage from the front to the last seat.’ To accomplish this, Mr D’souza used measurement tools including SysTune 1.2 audio measurement software, an Edirol UA-25EX 24bit/96kHz USB audio interface, an Isemcon EMX-7150 measurement microphone, an Isemcon SC-1 microphone calibrator and a Leica Disto laser measurer to calibrate the room, embedding all the data into JBL’s line array calculator. ‘I think this is one of the shows where the predicted result and actual result were so close that it made me feel really good,’ he reflects.
The system consisted of two main hangs of 12 VT4888s per-side, an outer array of eight 4887s per-side to cover the stands, four ground-stacked 4882 subs per-side and four VRX932LA compact line array cabinets as front-fills. The system was driven by nine Crown I-Tech 4x3500HD four-input touring amplifiers and eight Crown Macrotech 5000i, Macrotech 9000i and four Macrotech 12000i amps. All other equipment was provided by Yanni’s management, including Avid Profile consoles for both monitor mixing and FOH.
The reaction of Yanni’s production team to the event is summed up by the artist’s front of house engineer, Tommy Sterling. ‘The sound was absolutely amazing. It was a pleasure to mix on and the crew was excellent,’ he says.
‘I learned a lot on this concert,’ concludes Mr Lowe. ‘Working with Warren was easy for me as he is a very down to earth person as well as a good teacher when it came to sharing his technical knowledge with me. I was lucky enough to learn so many techniques including new rigging methods and working with the JBL Array calculator with rigging and coverage, and working with the prediction software to calculate measurements. It was truly an amazing experience for me and my company and I would especially like to thank Yasin Shaikh of Sound.com for the great support he gave us during the production.’
With Universal now scheduled to work on a Lionel Ritchie concert in October, it seems the time is right for Sri Lanka to be included on more international touring schedules as its production abilities ramp up.