Situated in a beautiful mountain valley 100 miles north of Vancouver, BC, this year’s run of the Pemberton Music Festival attracted close to 180,000 fans from over 15 countries with leading artists such as Pearl Jam, The Killers, Snoop Dogg, Kaskade, Ice Cube, Billy Idol, Cypress Hill, Savages, Steve Angello, Wiz Khalifa and The Chainsmokers, and more.
Delicate Productions (Hayward and Camarillo, CA) was responsible for providing audio for the four-day festival, deploying a Martin Audio MLA system for the Mount Currie stage, a Martin Audio Wavefront system for the Bass Camp stage and an L-Acoustics K1/K2 system for the Pemberton stage.
“It was really successful on every level overall,” states Jason Alt of Delicate Productions. “This is the third year Huka Entertainment has done this event and we’re the third audio vendor to take it on which presented its own logistics challenges in terms of really understanding how the festival works.
“For us, it was also a great showing for all of the Martin Audio loudspeakers,” he continues. “MLA and MLX obviously performed really well for a variety of artists and showcased what the system can handle in terms of different genres. The front of house engineers loved it and had a really great experience mixing on MLA from artists as heavy metal as you can get like Mastodon to artists like Ice Cube, which was a DJ and rap mics.
For the Mount Currie stage, the main PA consisted of 14 Martin Audio MLA and two MLD (downfill) cabinets a side, with 20 MLX subs ground-stacked in a cardioid setup, a dozen W8LM cabinets for front fill and side hangs of 10 MLA Compact each. Eight MLA cabinets a side were used for stereo flown delays at 250 and 400 feet. An Avid Profile 48/24 console system was posted at front of house.
The monitor rig included two Martin Audio WS18X subs for the drums, four W8C mid/high cabinets, four W8CS compact subs and 2 WS218X subs for side fills, all powered by Martin Audio MA5.2K amps An Avid Profile 48/24 console system was used for monitors.
The setup for Bass Camp stage, predominantly used for hip hop, rap and EDM artists, included 15 Martin Audio W8LC and a W8LCD (downfill) a side that “went from the roof to the floor,” according to Alt. More than 30 WS218X subwoofers, powered by Martin Audio MA5.2K amps, were used in addition to other subs to generate the required low end. Also included were stereo flown delays at 250 feet with eight W8LC cabinets a side. FOH and monitor control was again provided by Avid Profile 48/24 console systems, with Dolby Lake processing feeding 14 Martin Audio LE1200S stage monitors.
“The Mount Currie and Pemberton stages were a few hundred yards apart but faced in the same direction, while the Bass Camp stage was aimed all the way across the festival grounds at the other end. This posed challenges for the other stages because with all those subwoofers, we were generating some serious low end at Base Camp. But we were able to do some delay steering and use a cardioid pattern for the subs to keep the low end spill to a minimum.
The festival was organized so that the stages at Mount Currie and Pemberton didn’t overlap in terms of performances. A mass shift of people would migrate from one stage to the other after a set ended. “Which is actually good because it gave people a break and allowed them to get away from the audio for a while,” Alt notes.
“MLA’s control capability helped 100 percent and made for seamless coverage because we could steer it exactly to where we wanted those end points for the performances on Mount Currie to be,” Alt concludes. “And the ‘hard avoid’ feature on stage really helped a lot of the artists and their FOH engineers by allowing us to control the noise coming back onto the stage. And we were also able to create a 90-degree pattern with the subs to eliminate leakage to surrounding residences––even though it seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere––and that worked well.
“We used optimization to control how far MLA actually went during the day. Realistically, we could have gone further with the MLA main hangs and eliminated the delay towers, but the festival wanted to keep tighter control over the audio, mainly because there were a lot of food vendors at the back of the festival and they wanted the crowd to grow into those areas as well.”
