Wembly Weekend – Live Earth

Wembly Weekend By Part 1 Andy Wood and Wembly Weekend Part 2 by Mark FrinkLive Earth, Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, the 24-hour, seven-continent concert series that took place on 7/7/07 broke all records to become the largest global music entertainment event ever held. Bringing together over 100 music artists and an estimated audience of
over two billion, the eight concerts were staged at: Giants Stadium in New York (Firehouse Productions);

Wembley Stadium in London (Britannia Row); Aussie Stadium in Sydney; Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro; the Coca-Cola Dome in Johannesburg; Makuhari Messe in Tokyo; the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai (LAB); and the HSH Nordbank Arena in Hamburg (Satis&Fy). All shows were fully supported by Sennheiser’s new Global Support Group for microphone and personal monitor requirements.

In London, the newly opened Wembley Stadium was the backdrop for the show, with concert sound provided by UK firm Britannia Row Productions, supported by a host of manufacturers, including DiGiCo, Dolby, Electro-Voice and Outline.

Audio was set up with an A/B of splits, Front of House and monitor systems and trucks. A pair of DiGiCo D5 Live boards sat at the Front of House position with engineers Chris Coxhead and Chris Morrison at the A and B consoles respectively. Meanwhile at Monitor Beach, DiGiCo’s Roger Wood had the task of prepping the sessions for the two D5s on duty, assisted by Britannia Row’s Jon Lewis, Ben Phillips and Graham Blake.

Further D5s were used by Mike “Bunny” Warren on the show/presenter console, while DiGiCo’s Tim Shaxson sat at a further, offline, D5 that was used by guest engineers to check their settings.

The only exception was Metallica’s FOH engineer Big Mick Hughes, who mixed their set on a Midas XL8, which had been brought into Wembley in preparation for Metallica’s show at the venue the same day. [See accompanying article for more details.] All the consoles, plus another D5 specifically for Madonna, were fed into a DiGiCo D1, the routing board for the PA system.Audio systems engineers for the event were Sherif el Barbari, Nico Royan and Davide Lombardi who set up a flown Electro-Voice X-Line PA system combined with Outline Butterfly fills and delays to work in conjunction with the house PA, which was utilized on the upper tiers of the stadium. The Outline system comprised 70 Outline Butterfly Hi-packs and 20 Subtech 218 subwoofers, all powered by Outline T Series amplifiers.

“Absolutely everything came down to the D1,” explains el Barbari. “All of the band mixes came to the D1 and from there I sent them to the Dolby Lake matrix system and on to an EV Iris system, which gave me total control.”

The D1 delivered 24 feeds via the Dolby Lake Processors – three configured as 8 x 8 Mesa Quad Equalizers and one as a 4 x 12 zone controller – to the house PA speaker arrays, subwoofers, fills and delays. “Using the digital trim facility on the Dolby Lake Processors I could exactly match the digital and analog levels, so a fallback to analog, in case of a digital signal loss, would be seamless and not audible at all,” he added. Meanwhile, in Germany, the HSHNordbank Arena provided the venue, with Satis&Fy enlisted to handle the sound reinforcement.

Here, the FOH and monitor positions were occupied by a total of four Midas Heritage 3000 and two Heritage 2000 consoles, while Electro-Voice line arrays (X-Line and XLC) powered by Tour Grade TG-7 amps with RCM-26 Remote Control Modules acted as the main PA. In addition, an EV N8000 NetMax system handled the signal distribution for routing, matrix, delays and master EQs. The system team was led by FOH manager Bernd Buthe and monitor engineer Horst Hartmann. Andy Wood is European Editor for Live Sound International