For fans of heavy metal, one of the genre’s meccas this fall was Mexico City, which hosted the Corona Hell & Heaven Metal Fest on October 25.
Staged at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez racetrack grounds, heavy hitters KISS, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rob Zombie, Annihilator, Overkill and others took over two adjacent stages appropriately named “Hell” and “Heaven.”
The festival was also noteworthy in that it marked the country’s first combined deployment of L-Acoustics’ K1 and K2 systems, requiring the joint effort of two of Mexico’s leading sound-reinforcement providers, Procolor and Serpro.
Procolor Producciones, of Guadalajara, was the first K1 rental network provider in Mexico and has taken its system on tour with numerous artists, including Mana, Ricardo Arjona, Selena Gomez and Marc Antony, while Serpro Producciones, based in Monterrey, was one of the first to deploy K2 south of the border. Together, they designed and assembled two main-stage systems worthy of metal’s best.
“This has been a historical encounter,” exclaimed Alex Soto, owner of Guadalajara-based Soundsoul Productions, who was hired as sound director, sound designer and system engineer for the Corona Hell & Heaven Metal Fest. “For the first time in Mexico, K1 and K2 rocked together!”
Soto explains that 2 Hands Production Services, based in Mexico City, brought Procolor and Serpro together in order to have as consistent a sound as possible between the two stages. Since part of Procolor’s K1 rig was on tour, Serpro was called in. “Fortunately for us, Serpro’s K2 system – which is the first one in Mexico – recently arrived from France,” he says. “Since K1 and K2 are perfectly compatible, we decided to combine them, which worked fantastically.”
In fact, says Soto, the ability to integrate many different types of products made L-Acoustics the logical choice for this event. “We relied exclusively on L-Acoustics products for the entire festival,” he describes. “That eliminated a number of issues by having consistent equipment on every stage in every area, which also enhanced the confidence of the engineers, musicians and producers.
Soto says that was reflected in the sentiments of the mixers who worked the show. “Marko Vujovic who mixed Korn, is a nice guy and also a great engineer, and he was very pleased with the K1,” he says. “He played a virtual sound check from ProTools into his D-Show and I could see him nodding and smiling. He came over after the concert to let us know that he really liked what he got from the system, telling me, ‘I barely had to move EQ on my console!’
“Armando Chong, who mixed monitors on the Hell stage, used KUDO as sidefills and 115XT HiQ as floor monitors, and he said, ‘The fact that mixing monitors for a heavy metal fest and none of the bands asked me for anything else on their monitors – that means a lot! The headroom of 115XT before feedback was very awesome!’ Everyone had comments like that because the PA systems sounded so good and performed flawlessly.”
Equipment lists:
Hell:
Main PA: 6 K1-SB subs + 12 K1 elements + 3 KARA downfills per side
Subs: 32 SB28
Frontfills: 4 KUDO
Sidefills: 4 KUDO + 2 SB28 per side
Monitors: 14 115XT HiQ wedges
Drum monitor: 2 115XT HiQ + 2 SB18 subs + 4 SB28
Heaven:
Main PA: 5 K1-SB subs + 16 K2 elements per side
Subs: 32 SB28
Frontfills: 4 KUDO
Sidefills: 4 KUDO + 2 SB28 per side
Monitors: 14 115XT HiQ wedges
Drum monitor: 2 115XT HiQ + 2 SB18 subs
VIP section: 12 V-DOSC + 12 dV-DOSC
Amplifiers: 75 LA8 amplified controllers (combined total for all areas)
