Cambridge Folk Festival has never been easy to work on, but Canegreen, now on its third consecutive year, has always risen to the challenge, creating a system unique to this event. The festival is situated in the middle of a residential area, so sound levels have to be controlled. The site is also of limited size, with three stages and a large audience in close proximity, therefore Canegreen had to manage sound dispersion to reach all of the audience at each stage, without hearing the music from the other stages.
Front-of-house engineer Ange Jones and Canegreen's Pete Hughes managed the sound throughout the four-day festival. Pete took particular care with system management (attracting some interesting looks as he adjusted the delays using BSS Audio's Soundweb on his remote wireless PC tablet in the middle of the audience).
The equipment was selected and the systems designed to complement the dynamics and style of the music played. Flanking the main stage inside a clear-span marquee were Meyer MSL4s and Meyer 700 sub-woofers with UPA in-fills and flown MSL2s covering the audience in the marquee. A cleverly thought-out array of three delay positions, using a combination of Meyer MSL4s, MSL2s and MSL3s achieved good sound levels and quality to the audience outside the marquee, whilst containing the music within the arena.
Canegreen also used a state-of-the-art monitor control, with new Klark Teknik Helix digital graphics, managed by Seamus Fenton behind a Midas Heritage 3000 console. Pete Hughes has been managing the sound at the festival for three years now, providing the PA and crew for all three stages and he was especially pleased with the final accomplishments on the 40th Anniversary event. He commented: "The success of the sound was a credit to everyone in the team, a few of us had input into the system design at this year's festival; it is important to receive as many different views as possible, and there have been definite improvements year on year."
(Lee Baldock)
