Another weekend, another Festival, another ADLIB crew in a field – this one led by Kenny Perrin at the 2012 T In The Park Festival, staged at Balado, Kinross-shire, Scotland as the Liverpool, UK based rental company returned for the sixth consecutive year to provide sound for the King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut stage with their Lab.gruppen and Lake units in their kit bag.
The torrential rain and mud dampened absolutely NO spirits amongst the Scottish crowds, if anything, the weather helped galvanise a truly electric and unique atmosphere in the tent, making it one of the best ever T in the Parks.
A dynamic line-up veered from dance to rock and pop to hip-hop, appealing to all ages and tastes. It included memorable performances from the likes of Fun, The Wanted, Nero, Skrillex, J-Cole, Miles Kane, Ben Howard and the amazing Calvin Harris who really energised his home crowd! Kenny Perrin was joined by Michael Bernard Flaherty, Sam Proctor & Steve Pattison, and once again, a JBL VerTec system was specified following it’s great ‘all round’ success in the tent in past years.
The main PA hangs comprised 9 x VT4889 speakers per-side, with 4-a-side for the 2 x delay towers, positioned left and right of the FOH mixer to ensure the sound radiated evenly out to cover the back of the enormous tent. The subs were 16 x VerTec 4880As arranged in four blocks of four across the front of stage. For infills and outfills the system design utilised 16 x Coda LA8s.
A number of Lab.gruppen’s flagship amplifiers, the PLM 20000Q, were used to power the subs and in/out fills. The PLM 20000Q couples the world’s most powerful four-channel amplifier platform to the industry-leading digital sound manipulation features of Lake Processing. The result is a seamlessly unified sound reinforcement core that offers unprecedented flexibility, pristine digital filtering and delay, plus effortless ability to drive difficult loads, making it ideal for a situation like a major festival.
At front-of-house, ADLIB supplied a Soundcraft Vi6 console and one of their standard Lake processing/matrixing racks complete with two LM 44s and three LM 26s. Lake LM Series digital audio processors offer an unprecedented combination of core processing power, user-friendly control interfaces, and multi-format connectivity. Exclusive LM Series features include proprietary filter algorithms for Lake Mesa and Contour modules along with standard I/O connectivity on analog, AES3 digital and Dante network with programmable automatic failover The FOH domain was looked after by Pattison, with a selection of outboard also available as spec’d by certain engineers, including a TC 2290 tap delay.
All of the main acts brought their own FOH and monitor engineers, a trend that Perrin observes is becoming increasingly common.
Onstage, he looked after the monitors, with a Yamaha PM5D console and 18 x ADLIB MP3 wedges, all powered by PLM 10000s. For side fills 4 x arcs, 4 x SB28s were used and there were Adlib drum subs provided too (2 x MP3 subs & 2 × 15”). A full festival mics and stands package was also integral to the audio set up, and the patch was co-ordinated by Proctor and Flaherty. With around 10 bands a day to look after the pace was steady, and the 30 minute changeovers worked well.
Perrin has worked on T In The Park for the last four years and comments: “We have done this many times and got it down to a fine art where everything runs like clockwork and all involved in the production of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut work together in unison like a big happy family”.
He adds that the weather certainly made everything tougher going, but they all got stuck in “like real troopers” to ensure it happened efficiently and smoothly, and that all bands and their crews were happy… amidst plenty of Scottish chants of “Here we go” and that unique T In The Park vibe.