KC and the Sunshine Band (KCSB), an iconic group that first started performing in the early 1970s, is on tour with Yamaha Commercial Audio CL digital consoles at both front of house and monitors.
The system design is the product of front of house engineer David Dean, monitor engineer Chad Griswold, and production manager Rick Raymond brainstorming while sitting outside a frozen yogurt eatery in Sao Paulo, Brazil earlier this year.
“We sketched out the idea on a napkin and discussed the idea frequently through early summer,” explains Dean. “We have a large band, and our design sought to minimize the show footprint and truck pack as well as take advantage of the networked audio capability.”
Dean, who is a faculty member at Full Sail in Orlando, notes that the school has had a long history of using Yamaha consoles dating back to the PM3000 and 2500 models. “Faculty teaching within the Show Production Bachelor’s Degree program at Full Sail is active in the live event production field, and the gear we use to teach students has to be national act rider friendly for us to consider purchasing so that students learn on equipment they will use in the field,” he says. “The Yamaha gear fills these requirements.”
Brian Coviello of Yamaha Commercial Audio first broughta CL5 to Full Sail in 2013. “Initially, I was skeptical about us fitting it into our school curriculum, but fellow colleague and faculty member Mark Johnson and I witnessed my show production class setting up the CL5 and Rio rack system with no instructor help, says Dean. “They had the Dante patched up with multi-track playback and were making noise within 10 minutes.”
He adds that he attributes this to the similarities between the Yamaha M7CL and CL Series. The students utilize a 6-station M7CL mix lab on a regular basis and this familiarity helped them when presented with a CL. The M7CL lab also incorporates an old, but reliable CobraNet setup used to distribute multi-track from Pro Tools to each student’s M7CL via Yamaha MY cards.
After that experience, Dean said he came to the realization that the CL Series was going to be a player in the market that his students would soon be entering. “I no longer had reservations regarding our adopting the CL Series here at school,” he says. “In fact, we are currently in the process of designing an upgrade to our production facilities that will include Yamaha CL and QL consoles and Dante.”
KC and the Sunshine Band monitor engineer Chad Griswold was an early adopter of both CL and the newer QL Series, and was impressed with the capabilities of Dante. “He’d recently done a corporate gig where he had accessed a Shure ULX-D wireless system via Dante,” Dean says.
In addition to mixing monitors for KCSB, Griswold owns Mastermind Production Group, based in Orange, CA, where the new KCSB system was built and tested, incorporating the CL5/Rio/Dante option. “The benefit of losing most of our stage wiring while shrinking our monitor/front of house footprint would enable us to easily adapt to the different venue styles we encounter throughout the year with KC and the Sunshine Band,” Dean adds.
The dual CL5 approach for front of house and monitors consists of three Rio 1608-D input/output boxes on stage as stage I/O connections with custom panels for power and single I/O; one Rio1608-D in monitor world with RF mics in the same rack, handling all front of house sends and any extra inputs that the engineers frequently encounter, as well as two Rio Ro8 racks for in-ears (all ‘ears’ are now in their own rack), four Cisco SG300-20 switches—two at monitors and one for front of house on stage—and one 500-foot fiber optic snake for the front of house run.