UK - Manchester-based audio specialist tube uk dipped into its considerable stock of event equipment to service eight special nationwide Christmas trail installations over the festive period that were produced and curated by art and live experience afficionados, Culture Creative Ltd (CCL), in partnership with Raymond Gubbay, a division of Sony Music.
The trails were in different locations up and down the UK in a variety of nature-related settings including Bedgebury National Pinetum and Forest, Leeds Castle in Kent, Wimpole Estate near Cambridge, Stourhead in Wiltshire, Chester Zoo and Dunham Massey, plus the flagship trail in Kew Gardens.
Each trail involved between 15 and 28 separate sonic installations – 156 in total – which were essential to enhancing the mood, atmosphere, and magic, together with lighting and SFX. The sound installations ranged in length from a compact 25m to as long as 400m, so ‘flexibility’ of the chosen kit was high on the agenda after ‘make everything sound fantastic’!
The soundscape sources – typically a standard looped audio track – were all running on classic Sony Walkman audio players of which tube uk has 208. Over several years of outdoor trail experience and experimentation, these have proved simple, reliable and effective for this application.
tube uk has 2,054 JBL Control 1 speakers in stock, which are a default for ‘trail’ installations, “small and solid sounding is the way to go,” says tube uk’s Melvyn Coote.
The Control 1s were driven by SubZero PAD800 amps of which tube has 176, plus 12 x PAD600s, and there was also 95 x Behringer NX1000 amps on the different sites.
Most of tube uk’s 249 Yamaha MG06 mixers were deployed across the installations, which consumed approximately 38k of YY speaker cabling.
Once the different trail’s creative and content elements have been conceived by CCL’s managing director Zoe Bottrell and her team, Coote and tube come in to discuss audio requirements for each individual installation. They assess speaker placement and whether these need to be both sides or a single side of paths and walkways, together with the volumetric areas needing to be covered in any of the open or gathering spaces.
Three people – one experienced technician plus two others – installed the majority of the sites in three to five days. Kew was rigged by two people over a 14-day period, and tube now has five chief engineers who are very competent leading a team to install each site.
“And a few words of praise for our fantastic warehouse crew,” adds Coote, “who get landed with the gargantuan task of drying out, cleaning up, de-humidifying, testing and restoring the kit to full working order after several weeks of harsh outdoor labour – that is a lot of work!”
