Well, this will be a slightly different gig report, since I wasn't working it, but here goes anyway. The Bryan Adams concert last night was really good. At first the crowd seemed small but as the opener finished and it got closer to showtime I think there were at least 2000 people seated and another 3000 or so standing.
The concert was held in a beautiful new stadium set up for football (soccer for the American audience). I was surprised to find that the equipment was mostly local. The sound system was about half the size of what I wuold have expected for a show in Canada, but it sounded fairly good. I'm not sure how much of the sound was determined by the acoustics of the stadium, so I won't critisize too much. The band was really good, and they played pretty much all of Bryan's hits for the last 25 years. I was really surprised at the amount of audience participation, too. Since western musicians are a somewhat more rare event here, the crowd was a wider cross-section than you would normally see at a rock show. Lots of couples and older folks came, and in that sense the slightly underpowered PA system worked to advantage. The volume stayed pretty consistent throughout the Bryan Adams set, and didn't very too much from field to stands either. I would guess it was just around 100 dbA SPL peaks all night. The audio crew did a great job keeping everything sounding clean, too, considering that the system was probably at close to 100% output from the first song.
The most interesting part of the night, however, was who I met. While I was wandering around front of house to see where the production company was based, I asked the light crew chief where they were from. He said Canada (no surprise, Bryan Adams road crew). Turns out, though, he's from Halifax and used to work for ABI and Brad before moving on to other things. It was Dan Brooker, a name I have heard before and so we introduced ourselves and marvelled at the small world. After the next few weeks in this part of the world, he's headed back to the maritimes for the ECMAs, then back to South Africa with Bryan Adams, then back to Halifax for the Junos.
Anyway, read on for the gory technical details (pictures at the bottom).
As I mentioned, the PA and lights were local, which was a pleasant surprise (I think I'll have to pay Qatar Vision a visit to meet some of the folks and swap stories. Or maybe I'll just pretend I'm that cool, or something...). Bryan adams had an XL4 at FOH, an IEM rig (I just assume) and backline gear, and the rest was local. I tried to look at the PA but I couldn't get close enough to tell for sure. I saw a powered side fill cabinet on stage that looked a little like Meyer, so I wonder if the PA was MILO. It was 6 boxes a side, and I thought it was Adamson Y10s first, but up close I'm pretty sure it wasn't Adamson.
The light rig consisted of 10 lekos, 10 blinders, 4 strobes, 18 575 washes and 19 575 spots. The movers looked like they could have been the newer Coemar models, though I'm not sure. The roof system was about 72'x48' with PA outriggers. The PA tech that I talked to at FOH said that the company could actually put together 3 or 4 similar sized systems, so I'm not quite sure why they only had 6 tops a side.
At FOH, the support console was a Series 5, so it seems like Qatar Vision is a serious production company.
The lighting rig was pretty open a simple looking for a big name like Bryan Adams, but the operator did a very nice, professional show. I have a couple pictures that I'll add below. In the second picture, all those dots you see at the bottom of the picture aren't lighters - those are screens of cell phones that people were using to take pictures or videos of the concert! Seems like cell phones are the new rock concert lighter in the air.
