Urban Electra, a female electric string quartet with a repertoire that includes arrangements of hits by such artists as Muse, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin joined by selections from Mozart, Bach and more, is supported by RF Venue components that include a CP Beam antenna and a COMBINE4 active IEM transmitter combiner.
A signature move of the group is to have each musician perform from a separate riser, in some cases as much as 100 feet or more apart, in the same large venue. “It can be challenging, like the time they performed for an Ameriprise Financial event with 3,500 guests at the Boston Convention Center, when each of their individual stages were literally 125 feet apart from each other,” explains Jim May, CEO of Phoenix, Arizona-based production company Jim May Productions and Urban Electra’s long-time production and tour manager and wireless supervisor. “They can’t see each other that far apart, and they cannot keep the music together unless they’re able to hear themselves clearly and consistently through their in-ear monitors. Avoiding dropouts is critical.”
May has guided Urban Electra’s journey throughout the RF spectrum’s bumpy road over the last two decades, investing in new wireless systems as needed over that time, but the ever-smaller available spectrum made using wireless instruments and IEMs, such as Shure PSM900 IEMs and ULXD transmitters, more challenging. May had some experience with RF Venue’s products and sought out further information from YouTube videos created by RF Venue senior applications engineer Don Boomer, and then reached out to him in person.
“One thing Don taught me was not to wrap the cable in a circle less than a foot in diameter, because that can cause the copper wire to go out of round and it won’t transmit the signal properly,”May says. “He also told me to group my IEMs together at the top of the frequency range and group transmitters together in the lower end of the band, so they were not conflicting.”
At a subsequent corporate event at which Urban Electra’s musicians were again positioned on separate risers, he followed Boomer’s suggestion to reduce the transmitter output to 50 percent, deployed a CP Beam antenna on a 10-foot-high stand, and for the first time utilized RF Venue’s RG8X coaxial cable.
“Before the show, I played music over one channel of the wireless and took a bodypack and walked it through several rooms of the venue,” he says. “I got close to 500 feet away from the receiver and not a single dropout. That opened up a whole new world of wireless for us. Lowering the transmitter output and letting the CP Beam antenna do the hard work was a revelation. You can’t get that kind of reception with little paddles. We use 10 channels of RF every night, and we haven’t had a dropout since.”
