As a community development project, the Oregon Jamboree rocks – with a country flavor.
The Jamboree is quite likely the largest and most successful popular music festival in America that operates under the auspices of a community rather than a private promoter. In this case it’s for the sole benefit of Sweet Home (population around 8,000), a logging and mill town hit hard by the timber harvest cutbacks of the early 1990’s. Looking to leverage its location in the scenic Cascade foothills, the town decided to boost tourism by hosting a country music festival. Applying federal timber settlement dollars as seed money, the festival premiered in 1992 and has grown steadily ever since. Over 500 townspeople volunteer yearly for the event, working as everything from stagehands to drivers for buses that shuttle fans back and forth from the 16 temporary campgrounds also operated by the festival. (Buses are big, bright yellow, and otherwise rarely used in August.) After money is set aside for the following year’s event, the remaining proceeds – well into six figures lately – go to community development grants.
The sixteenth edition of festival ran the first weekend in August of 2008, with total three-day attendance pushing 40,000. Fans spanning the generations – from preteen through geriatric – streamed into the site to hear the thirteen acts, with headliners ranging from high-energy contemporary artists like Sugarland, Trace Adkins and Neal McCoy to enduring icons like Glen Campbell and former Alabama frontman Randy Owen.
Since 2003, sound for the Jamboree has been supplied by Portland-based Horne Audio. For company owner J. Peter Horne, the Jamboree is a keystone event in his summer schedule. “It’s certainly one of my bigger events in terms of size and income,” he says. “It’s also very well run. Any issues that come up seem to get resolved in a non-stressful way, which means I can kick back and have some fun.”
Horne was contracted for the Jamboree when the previous sound supplier failed to keep pace with the festival’s growth, according to festival director Peter LaPonte. “Every year Peter [Horne] listens and makes notes,” he says, “and then makes new equipment purchases based on what worked and what didn’t. Also, his monitor engineers are top-of-the-line. We never hear of problems or complaints.”
To cover the festival grounds, which requires a maximum throw of well over 400 feet to the back of the audience area, Horne deployed an Electro-Voice XLC-based line array system. The main hangs of 12 mid-high cabinets per side were buttressed by 12 XLC-215 subwoofers. A beefed-up side hang of ten XLC-127 DVX cabs covered the all-important beer garden at stage left, and ten more of the same (plus four more subs) were placed on a single delay tower behind the FOH mix. Down- and front-fill duties were handled by a total of 10 compact XLD-281 line array cabinets. Everything was amplified by Lab.gruppen FP+ Series and PLM Series units, with three external Dolby Lake Processors shaping the signals for the FP+ racks.
The biggest challenge facing Horne in his system design was the “upside down” seating: many of the older patrons paid extra to sit up front in the (aptly named?) reserved section, while younger fans of today’s high-dB country sound were partying out in the “back forty.” Ground stacked subwoofers had proven particularly troublesome. The essence of the problem was recounted by festival director Peter LaPonte: “It was so loud you could feel it slamming your chest. A few years back, one of my staff told me about an older gentleman who angrily walked out saying he was wearing a pacemaker and feared for his safety.”
Horne’s first order of business was flying all the subs. Then he configured and shaded his XLC arrays for an emphasis on the long throw. Essentially, the overriding goal was to throw as much sound to the back as possible while keeping levels under control in the front.
“I beefed up the delays quite a bit this year,” says Horne. “Also, the top six cabinets in the main arrays are the brand new XLC-907 DVXs, which are a 90-degree horizontal box. That narrower focus helps to pump up the levels toward the back. When you move out wide of the delays, the coverage is much better this year than in the past.” Horne utilized the E-V LAPS software to aid array configuration, then switched to SpectraFoo for final system tuning.
Thanks to availability of well-instructed volunteer muscle, Horne managed the festival with a bare-bones crew. Horne works as FOH liaison and mixes any opening acts (only one this year) without their own engineer. Mark “Sparky” McNeill was the on-stage operations chief, while Don Lindsey turned over monitor mixing/liaison duties to Steve Beatty on Saturday when he had to leave for another mixing commitment.
Up at FOH, the console complement was 100% digital, with Digidesign Venue boards continuing an upward trend. Horne brought along his own pair of the compact D-Show Profile desks, with one permanently stationed for playback and the other available for acts carrying little or no production of their own. Three of the top-billed acts carried the complete FOH and monitor kit, while most supporting acts used Horne’s FOH and monitor packages – as did headliner Randy Owen, who was on a fly date.
“There’s been a definite shift toward the Digidesign boards,” says Horne. “It seems like the country acts have latched on to them even more than in the rock world. We bought our first Profile last year, and the second just a few months ago.”
Also new to Horne’s inventory this year are his racks of Lab.gruppen amplifiers. For the Jamboree, all the main house arrays were powered by a total of 24 FP+ Series units (FP 7000, FP 100000 and FP 130000) while delays and monitors were driven by ten PLM Series Powered Loudspeaker Management Systems with their own built-in Dolby Lake processing.
Horne says he was particularly impressed with the guts of the FP 130000 units that fed the flown subwoofers. “Without the ground coupling that you get with stacked subs, engineers tend to push the flown subs really hard to get low end you can feel. But the Lab 13k’s just cruised right along no matter what we gave them.”
The networked monitoring and control features were also mentioned as a factor in his switch to Lab.gruppen. “The DeviceControl software is very user friendly, and lets me know what’s going on with my load. For example, on setup day I was able to determine quickly that I was missing something. It was a mistake we’d made that showed up right away. We didn’t have to waste a bunch of time tracking it down, or worse yet, do the show lacking a couple of subs.”
In monitor world, Horne confronted a peculiar mixed bag for 2008. He owns both Shure and Sennheiser wireless in-ear packages, but nobody asked that he bring either. Most headliners brought their own in-ear rigs, with everybody else happy to use his complement of L-acoustics 1154XT HiQ wedges. “They are very rider-friendly,” he notes, “and I like the coaxial design because I don’t have to worry about matched left and right pairs.” Horne supplied his own Yamaha PM-5D as a monitor console, with about half of the acts bringing their own digital boards, a mix of mostly Digidesign and Yamaha – with one early-in-the-day act even employing Yamaha’s ultra-compact LS-9.
Horne’s 60-plus package of hard-wired microphones — largely Shure with a smattering of AKG, Beyer and Neumann models for targeted applications – was supplemented by 10 channels of Shure UHF-wireless models.
Of course, this is Oregon, and though 99% of the precipitation falls between October and June, the occasional “heavy Oregon mist” does creep up the Willamette Valley on summer days. In this case, it fell almost entirely during the opening act – comic duo Williams and Ree – on Friday. By the time red-hot Sugarland hit the stage to close the night, the tarps were pulled back and the system was ready to prove its mettle.
“I know sound is very subjective, but I’d have to say that Sugarland’s engineer, Dave Haskell, had the rig sound exceptionally good,” says Horne. “The same holds for Trace Adkins’ guy. Each had a unique approach to mixing, but both did a great job of getting their sound out there.”
Festival director Peter LaPorte was even more forthright in his praise, stating, “Sugarland’s show was one of the best sounding I’ve heard anywhere, here or at any other festival, for as far back as I can remember.” He credits Haskell with the artistic judgment, but also acknowledges Horne Audio’s commitment to constant improvement.
“Peter [Horne] really nailed it this year,” he maintains. “It wasn’t too loud up front, but it still had plenty of fullness and clarity all the way to the back. He managed that trick better than ever this year.”
It should be noted that Horne did not have to be concerned with excessive SPL outside the venue, as is often the case with festivals surrounded by residential neighborhoods. (The balance of the year, the festival site serves as baseball and soccer fields for the adjoining middle school and high school.) “There’s no limit out in the city,” observes Horne. “Nobody checks because they don’t really care. Everybody loves it. It’s the sound of more money coming into their community.”
Also, Sweet Home is a country music kind of town. Early on Friday, residents along 14th Street – next to the festival grounds in line with the main arrays – were putting out lawn chairs and coolers on the front lawns. After all, this was the week when Sugarland was battling “Hannah Montana” for the number one slot on the Billboard Hot 200 (all CD sales, not just country), and these well-located Sweet Home citizens could hear a free show at only slightly reduced levels. Another fringe benefit of community development with a driving beat.