A cutting edge Adamson S10 line array system supplied by pro audio specialists, The Warehouse Sound Services Ltd, hit all the right notes during a sell-out run of the smash-hit 1980s musical, Chess, at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre last month.
Students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) achieved critical acclaim after staging the West End and Broadway hit show in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The Warehouse, alongside the RCS’s Sound Designer, Calum Paterson and Lecturer in Sound, Gavin Jenkinson, developed a complex sound design for the show.
The Edinburgh run was the first time the musical theatre show had transferred from the Conservatoire’s New Athenaeum Theatre to the professional stage. It also allowed music and production students to transfer their skills to the professional stage for the first time.
The production was staged by the creative team behind the Conservatoire’s critically acclaimed productions of Cabaret and West Side Story and brought together technicians, artists, musicians and performers from across the RCS.
Professor Andrew Panton, artistic director of musical theatre at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, commented: “Chess is by far the most technically ambitious production we’ve ever tackled and, once again, the process has been special because of the student, staff and guest creative team collaboration.”
The Warehouse has worked with the RCS for over a decade installing sound solutions for many of its live theatre and music shows. The Warehouse is the sole UK distributor for Adamson and has invested heavily in the brand believing it to provide the ultimate solution for theatres and touring shows. The Warehouse believed that Adamson would be the perfect sound solution for the run of Chess at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre.
The layout of the 2000 capacity auditorium was the main audio challenge as the sloped stalls seating and two levels of sloped balcony seating, which wrap around all three walls. This requires a lot of vertical coverage, as sound designer Paterson wanted to reach every level with the main hangs.
In order to ensure even coverage for every seat in the house, 24 Adamson S10 line array sound speakers where flown left and right of the stage. A total of 8 S119 subwoofers were also utilised to reinforce low end all powered with Lab Gruppen PLM20K44 amplifiers. A Digico SD10 mixing console was used on front of house with 24 ways Shure UHF-R radio mics for the cast and a mix of AKG, Shure, Sennheiser and DPA microphones for the 27 members of the orchestra.
