Capsule Chook
Music Festival
Hangzhou, China
Capsule Chook is a campus music festival held by Communication University of Zhejiang and sponsored by Pepsi China. All kinds of student bands and musicians got the chance to perform on stage, this music festival became the most lively performance at the end of the year 2019 in our university
My position: Sound Engineer &
Live Sound Mixing
Music Festivals always need high dynamics and incredibly high sound pressure level to arouse the enthusiasm of the audience, especially its for the energetic college students. But while pushing the system to high level, I also need to consider whether it can withstand the greater dynamic from all kinds of band instruments. The design of the sound system and the design of the sound pickup on the stage are particularly important in this process.
On the basis of the house system with two sets of compact line arrays in the university's theatre, I installed another two sets of small arrays and subs on the left and right sides of the stage. This makes the sound coverage that was originally unreasonable due to the use of compact line arrays very equal in all the seating areas now.
After calibrating the system, I pushed the nominal level to a higher level for this show but also left enough headroom at the same time, which makes the system capable of dealing with all kinds of crazy rock songs.
For sound pickup, we used almost all the microphones that the school recording studio could provide us. For guitar amps, we mainly used the Sennheiser E609 directional microphone. For bass’s speaker, we specially use Shure beta 52A microphone, which can be good for low end pickup. For the acoustic drum sets, we also built a complete mic pickup system, including using Telefunken DD5 set, AKG C451 for Hi-hat, Sennheiser E614 for overhead LR, etc. For other electric instruments there are also a lot of DI boxes for connecting them into our console.
And because of the high sound pressure level of the speakers and the high sensitivity of some microphones, the problem of feedback becomes more serious. So I also borrowed a DBX AFS 224 feedback suppressor from the acoustic laboratory to suppress squealing. We used the fixed filter mode on the feedback suppressor to capture the squealing frequency point in the theatre, so that it can automatically suppress the those frequencies during the performance. The use of feedback suppressors gives me much more space when mixing the sound.
All in all, it was a very successful performance in my college time and the enthusiasm of the audience was unprecedentedly high, which left a very indelible impression on my college memory.
Archive
Audience infected by the festival atmosphere
Install Auxiliary Speaker Arrays
Main Stage
Guitar Amp Pickup
Drum Set Pickup
Sound Team
Tech Rehearsal
