Concert Systems USA: On the Road with Innova SON for KC & The Sunshine Band
By Claudia Kienzle

When KC & The Sunshine Band’s 2001 Summer Tour left the Walnut Creek Amphitheater, in Raleigh, NC, on July 17, concert officials at Madison Square Garden were very concerned.

They were expecting KC, and their opening act The Village People, to perform at their Paramount Theater, in NY, in less than 24 hours. And they doubted that the crew would be able to take down the production, pack it into their semi, drive up to New York, and unload it and set-up by 8pm.

To make things even dicier, the road crew finished loading the equipment into the semi three hours later than planned before leaving for the all-night drive. Even KC’s tour manager Rick Raymond was worried they might not get the lights and sound set-up for the MSG show in time.

But everything went smoothly. “Not only did we get the show set-up in time, we had hours to kill in the City before they opened the doors,” says Randy Frierson, President of Concert Systems USA, the full-service concert production company, in Ocean Springs, MS that provided the equipment, the 53-foot semi-trailer, and the expert crew to support the tour.

The mile-long list of equipment included Nexo Alpha stacks powered by Camco Vortex amplifiers; a Midas Heritage 3000 for monitors and a sophisticated computer-controlled lighting system. Frierson sent monitor tech Chris Stultz to help KC’s monitor engineer Barry Foy.

Managing Multiple Acts:

But the gear that made the blazing fast turn-around possible was the Innova SON Grand Live, a digital FOH mixing desk, and the expertise of Concert Systems USA’s FOH Tech Harry Brill, Jr.

“The biggest advantage is that the Innova SON handles multiple acts from one desk, and recalls their individual sound level parameters instantly,” says Frierson.

What this meant for that July 18 show at the Garden was that there was less equipment to load, transport, install, and set-up. And with Innova SON’s automatic precision recall capability, which made it very easy to bring their desired channel settings back up, both bands started their sound checks from a good, solid jumping off point. This automation feature shaved hours off the sound check because the FOH engineer didn’t have to manually turn hundreds of knobs, and listen to the speakers in an effort to re-establish the proper levels by trial and error.

Barry Foy, monitor mixer for K.C. and the Sunshine Band.

“So a process that used to take hours now moved incredibly fast,” says George Straikis, the FOH Engineer for KC & the Sunshine Band’s 2001 Summer Tour, from July 13 through August 30, in various states. Straikis is also owner of Rehearsal Studio Productions, a rehearsal and recording studio, in Indianapolis, IN.

“Whenever we changed venues, we ran through settings files that we saved from previous shows and selected the best match for the new venue situation. We also did a little EQ-ing of the PA to adjust for differences in the size and acoustics of the venues,” says Straikis. “When the Village People finished their set, we’d select the next settings, and the levels instantly restored KC’s sound-checked levels.”

The Innova SON offers 256 pages on which to store the settings, but the system’s Sensory Live memory can handle more than 500 pages. After hitting Save, the operator just types in the band name and concert occasion—like KC at Paramount or KC outdoor concert—in the system’s internal hard drive, or off-load all the data to floppy disk.

“When you select a page, the faders physically move automatically to the pre-set, saved levels,” says Straikis. “But you can easily modify those settings, reset them, or hit delete. What’s vital to us is how user-friendly it is.”

George Strakis, FOH for K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and Concert Systems’ Harry Brill.

Rather than having a 56-channel snake coming off the stage, the Innova SON has a pair of coaxial cables that connect the FOH to the Innova SON Stage box which houses the 56 mic-pre’s to a Whirlwind Concert 52 splitter and that is how the signal is also routed to the analogue desk. The Innova SON Grand Live can handle up to 72 inputs, with 24 outputs, and though this was a huge show, there were inputs and outputs left over.

Count on Change:

At a few of the shows on the KC tour, War joined the line-up as the opening act to the Village People and KC. At one such show in Baltimore, War’s production company cancelled out on them at the last minute, leaving them in a real bind.

“They turned to Rick Raymond and asked if we could help them out,” says Frierson. “Frankly, if it were not for this digital FOH system, we could not have helped them on such short notice, and they would have had to cancel. It’s a small console, but it was no problem at all to add settings for a third band, or more.”

With the purchase of a digital desk like the Innova SON, Frierson says that the return on investment comes from several factors. First, there’s less equipment to move and install, so you need less truck space and fewer crew people.

Chris Stultz, Concert Systems USA monitor tech.

Secondly, a single digital desk takes up fewer seats than several analogue desks. In the venues where the KC tour had three acts lined up, the Innova SON took up only 10 seats compared to the 30 seats that three analogue consoles would have consumed. A savings of 20 seats per performance helps make the tour more profitable.

Lastly, Frierson hopes that the move to digital will make Concert Systems USA more competitive in attracting micro-tours, festivals, and other multiple act events, and increase revenues. “Producing multiple acts is a growing trend, and digital technology is going to enable us to satisfy those customers and expand the business,” says Frierson.

“As co-owners of this business, Sabine Ladner and I had to forecast the future, and our feeling is that tour managers are going to want to streamline their productions by putting less equipment on the road to save time and money,” says Frierson.

Originally, Frierson had a second Midas H-3000 on order to serve KC’s FOH needs. But, realizing that a digital system would offer many benefits, he posed it to Rick Raymond, and they decided to cancel the Midas in favor of the digital console, which arrived on July 5. Innova SON (which is based in France) flew one of its top clinicians, Jeff Alexander, to Mississippi to train everyone in time for the KC tour.

When asked if digital is the wave of the future, George Straikis said, “We’ll be interfacing with the analogue world for awhile due to the cost of digital. For smaller shows, it’s not necessarily cost-effective to rent a digital system. But on bigger productions with the financial flexibility to handle that cost, a digital system is very worthwhile.”