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Mammoth concert challenge for Lord Rothschild's MAD About Waddesdon

1st Jul, 2006 to 2nd Jul, 2006

Waddesdon Manor, a beautiful Renaissance-style French Chateau, was built in 1874 by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to display his outstanding collection of art treasures. It’s now run by a family charitable trust chaired by the present Lord Rothschild. With 300,000 visitors each year, it’s a very popular tourist attraction.

So, where do we fit in? We were approached by a TV producer in London to come up with a sound spec to cover the entire festival, which incorporated dance, drama, and ballet, plus and a feast of live music entertainment from a small rock band, to a full 60 piece Orchestra across a total of four stages.

Good quality PA systems

Waddesdon is a large site, covering literally acres of land both to the front and behind the Chateau. This had its logistic problems as far as moving equipment (and people) around the site were concerned. It was out of the equation to have huge articulated trucks of PA across the beautiful lawns, so smaller vans were used to ferry PA from accessible roads, with an entire fleet of golf buggies used to move sound, lighting and management crew around. With stages so far apart, wheels soon had the advantage over boot leather!

It was hot work too, the temperature in early July peaked at 32 degrees, so there was no chance of catching a cold! 

Transforming such a beautiful place into an arena for a large production such as this took a considerable amount of careful planning. The brief for sound was simple, make audible 3,000 musicians (yes, 3,000!) over 2 days, to an audience of possibly 10,000 with good quality PA systems. Challenging enough considering the amount of microphone channels required, but then came the real crunch; changeovers had to be a fast as possible, very little break, and limited to a couple of minutes. 

For anyone who has attempted this on live stage events, this is a very tall order indeed. Our crew had worked at Glastonbury, and other major UK and European festivals before, but never with so many musicians on stage, and never with such tight changeovers. 

Orchestra sound

5-piece bands can be changed over in around 5 minutes flat, but here we were talking 60 piece Orchestras with very precise and demanding microphone placement with vast amounts of channel inputs! From providing sound to the likes of the Royal National Opera, and the The Halle, (amongst others) we know how demanding microphone placement is for live instruments, especially outdoors.

Jeff Byard pondered about it, slept on it, pondered again, then decided to go to away for a few days to really think about it, and came back with an ingenious technical solution.

Here’s the plot; there were two main stages. The main stage was the largest, with a huge ground-stacked PA system either side on towers, bolstered by sub-bass. The Amphitheatre, a slightly smaller, (but no less technically challenging stage) was built behind the Chateau and had a Martin line-array speaker system installed (below), simply because the audience area was set within a natural amphitheatre looking up toward the audience. Whilst this stage looked great, we had to electronically tilt the sound toward the audience somehow, otherwise, we would be firing straight into the grass, and huge pockets of dead spots would have occurred. Line-array makes this possible by ‘steering’ the sound into the required areas.

Orchestral spot mics

Jeff mapped out each stage for an array of overhead mics. These were not ordinary mics you would find in the toolbox of most hire companies. We used Schoeps Mk4 cardioids. The reason why we chose these units is the off-axis response is as near linear as you can ever achieve with a microphone, which means multiple instruments can be picked up by just one unit. The sound is also consistent with clarity and frequency range, at very long distances from the mic capsule.

We calculated the precise data for each unit, ensuring height above stage, and the coverage angles, were as accurate as possible without conflicting with other mics, or causing feedback.

We then planned another stage level set-up, for closer mic’ing of choirs, with overhead spot mics on strings, and Violas, and individual mics across the quieter woodwind instruments.

We didn’t always use the stage array, as the overhead arrangement of mics worked so well.

And all that Jazz

The repertoire was extensive, from Mozart, to Jazz, and from rock and roll to Blues. Jeff recalls numbers played from the popular musical Chicago. ‘You would have thought the young drummer was Argentinean himself! His Tango-style of drumming in the Cell Block Tango, was perfect.’ All the young artists were good performers. Some children were only of primary school age, and playing very difficult instruments. The buzz and spontaneity of the whole event was felt by everyone.

During day one, Jeff had to mix from 9.00am on day 1, up to 3.00pm, then make a quick exit for setting up and mixing the Bucks Chamber Orchestra through the line-array system on stage 2. ‘I never stopped for food all day. Only afterwards I realised why they called it Mad About Waddesdon. Yes, for crew, it was really, really mad!’   

News about the event got around quickly too. Cherie Blair called Lord Rothschild asking if she could come and join in (after hearing about the event on BBC Radio) a visit which was totally unplanned.

PA for the Classics

For the ‘Proms’ finale, which incorporated the usual Elgar’s classics, the musicians brought the whole audience to a standing ovation with the usual 2 encores required!

The whole sound team, received good comments about the sound production, but one man summed it up out of the audience: ‘How on earth did you manage working 12 hour shifts, in over 30 degrees?’ Jeff Byard commented: ‘well, we did have plenty of water!’

Sadly, we never did have time to visit Lord Rothschild’s world-famous wine cellars in the Chateau, opened up to the public during the festival. Maybe, next time..