The recent 15th Basel Tattoo, an annual military music show performed by international military bands, display teams, musicians, and tattoo formations in Basel, Switzerland, was supported by a sound design by Tom Strebel that utilized TiMax SoundHub spatialization from OutBoard to meet the sonic imaging and musical timing needs of the 7,000-capacity, arena-scale production.
Inspired by the UK’s Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which also makes extensive use of TiMax, this year’s Basel event presented acts ranging from the Welsh Guards, Swiss Army, Norwegian Guards, USAF drill team, Indian Kumudini Band, the Red Hot Chilli Pipers and Edinburgh favorites, the Basel Top Secret Drum Corps, plus special guests this year – a herd of dairy cows from the Swiss highlands.
Strebel’s team of technicians and engineers from audiopool of Basel once again handled the complex wireless systems, microphone, in-ear monitoring and backline changeovers, along with the front of house TiMax mix plus monitoring and show recordings done via a separate DiGiCo console in a backstage studio.
The multi-channel audio system driven by the SoundHub spatial processor comprised 30-plus distributed Clair Brothers loudspeakers and subwoofers with Lab Gruppen amplification, all supplied this year for the first time by AudioRentClairAG. As in previous years, Dave Haydon from OutBoard was on-site for rehearsals to support system setup and spatial cue programming for audiopool’s engineers.
Group outputs from the FOH DiGiCo SD7 console fed wireless mics to TiMax via MADI, then individual TiMax outputs fed each loudspeaker channel, including 11 distributed subbass cabs under the audience seating. TiMax Image Definition objects provided multiple timings between input sources and loudspeakers onto 28 zones across the arena, including a couple of upstage and mid-stage immersive stereo playback and Bricasti reverb images. Haydon and audiopool programmed a series of TiMax cues to follow the multiple static or marching band microphone by placing or drawing timed trajectories for the input objects onto TiMax PanSpace.
Haydon notes, “Despite the forced hiatus of the last couple of years, the performers and crew pretty much picked up from where it had been refined to over previous years, including a number of necessary ‘cheats’ such as re-locating entire house-band and choir segments into the arena centre to maintain musical timing for certain set-pieces and the finale. As always, we’re very proud to be involved, and it was great to see the show get a three-minute standing ovation at the premiere.”
