The recent Amor Y Patria (Love and Country) tour of the U.S. by Latin Grammy-winning artist Alejandro Fernández Abarca, also known as “El Potrillo” (The Foal), was supported by Guadalajara-based sound reinforcement provider Rent All Pro Production carrying a main sound reinforcement system headed by L-Acoustics K1 line arrays and supporting components.
Rent All Pro, formerly known as Procolor Producciones, was the first L-Acoustics K1 rental network provider in Mexico and has taken its system on tour with many artists over the years, including Maná, Ricardo Arjona, Selena Gomez, and Marc Antony. Heraclio Bernal, who has been with Procolor since 1990, has served as Fernández’s front of house engineer for the past 20 years, and he chose to carry an L-Acoustics system once again on the latest tour.
“My first show with Alejandro was on Valentine’s Day in 2003 — we used V-DOSC back then — and he’s pretty much toured with L-Acoustics whenever possible ever since,” says Bernal, who has also worked as a systems technician on tours with Maluma, Carlos Vives, and Alfredo Olivas in recent years. “With 25 musicians behind him, the challenge of mixing Alejandro is to be able to make his voice as ‘present’ as possible, which is something that the K Series truly excels at. I’m not talking about power—which there is plenty of — but, rather, natural tonality and intelligibility over the instrumentation. K1 always delivers a wonderfully coherent presence and uniformity throughout each venue, from the first row to the last.”
Rent All Pro’s typical loudspeaker deployment included left and right main hangs of 14 K1 over four K2 down, with 15 Kara II flown per side as outfills. Six SB28 ground subwoofers per side were arranged in a gradient array. Four stacks of two Kiva II across the stage served as frontfills, while four flown ARCS provided infill. Ten LA-RAK II AVB touring racks, each loaded with three LA12X amplified controllers, powered the system, which was processed by a pair of P1 Milan AVB processors located at FOH. “AVB is always super stable and the fact that control and signal travel on a network cable offers an enormous advantage,” Bernal notes.
In addition to mixing the show on his DiGiCo Quantum7 console, Bernal handles the tour’s PA system engineering and deployment and quickly praises the L-Acoustics Soundvision design platform. “In my opinion, Soundvision is the best program that exists to model sound systems—it’s super-intuitive and the 3D is wonderful,” he describes. “FIR Autofilters is a modern tool that has greatly helped with frequency absorption due to ever-changing temperature and humidity. Also, since 95% of our shows are in indoor venues, Soundvision helped me choose Kara II for the out-fill hangs, as we were trying not to add too many low frequencies in the flown systems. It turned out to be a great decision since the LF control was adequately achieved, and the Kara II were supported by the low end of the K1/K2 main hangs.”
