20 years with Pleasance. Marking a great working partnership!

Marking a great working partnership!

Each spring, work starts in earnest on preparing for a few short, manic weeks in August that represent the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. With 22 venues and about 217 shows to equip and support, the Pleasance sound team under Head of Sound Tom Lishman has its work cut out and, as a formal Production Partner, Orbital's crew rolls its sleeves up and gets to work.

Pleasance's Director Anthony Alderson summed it all up during an interview with the Spin during this year's Fringe, saying:
"There really are no boundaries to our Festival – we are always looking to do something new and exciting. With 600,000 tickets on sale this year, we are stretching things to the limit – from our tiny 2-seater venue "The Shed" to our biggest venue, the 760-seat Pleasance Grand. Pleasance London now plays a very important part in our preparations, enabling us to keep a core of staff together throughout the year and generate revenue on an ongoing basis. As a co-operation between three charities, Pleasance is an unusual entity, but it's a combination
that works brilliantly well."

Tom Lishman is responsible for putting together the sound team
behind the scenes, and has built up a pool of talent over the years. Young technicians enjoy a "baptism by fire with a safety net", courtesy of the Pleasance Fringe experience, with many coming back year after year. As Tom explains:
"The Festival has its own inbuilt aspirational ladder and is a great place for young engineers to start their careers and be exposed to such a breadth of work. We see people change dramatically – the amount of personal development is tremendous, particularly when you bear in mind that a minute during the Festival is like an hour of real time! Our knowledge of the event logistics grows and is handed on year on year, based on always adding a new element to the jigsaw puzzle and focusing on how we can improve the audience experience.

"Orbital plays an essential part, from their meticulous planning in the months preceding the Festival, to working on site solidly for ten days before we open. Since I joined the team 15 years ago, we have progressed from nine spaces and just 10 radiomics hired in from Orbital. Today we have 10 radiomics in the Grand alone! That's how much things have changed."

A first for this year in The Grand was the introduction of the d&b audiotechnik T-Series line array, working alongside the Yamaha CL5 digital mixer – a real hit after the team deployed one of Orbital's brand new desks in 2012. The verdict was simply that the room sounded "awesomely better". The Pleasance venues are almost universally equipped with d&b loudspeakers, on the basis of providing a conformity of infrastructure, something Tom believes contributes enormously to the overall quality of the venues and also streamlines the technical elements. Audiences will typically move between the venues, seeing a number of shows, and maintaining the audio consistency between the spaces in this way is a critical aspect. Upgrades for 2013 included B2 SUBS and B4s to complement the new T-Series array in the Grand, as well as the introduction of d&b systems in a number of the smaller venues. The complement of mixers was also extended this year - in addition to the Yamaha CL5s for the main venues, Orbital provided Yamaha LS9s for the medium-sized spaces, plus Soundcraft Spirit desks for the smaller ones, alongside a raft of other high-end audio equipment that included Tascam, Sennheiser and many other major brands.

The right choice of equipment is fundamental, as Tom expands:
"The d&b speakers are so well-behaved in a challenging environment, as well as being really powerful. The same is true for the CL5 – we typically find that our team take just an hour to learn it from a standing start. It's robust and reliable, as well as enormously powerful and takes whatever we throw at it – and we give it a real pounding!"

After months of preparation, everything arrives on site in one large truck. Tom's comment that "not many other UK sound hire companies could cope with something as technically challenging as this" underlines the nature of the project year on year, supported by a "can do" attitude that is essential to Pleasance's Festival success. Everything is pre-planned – from the cabling and infrastructure laying, down to the smallest items of audio equipment, so that everything arrives together on the one truck, packed in order for loading in venue by venue.

With the digital aspect of the Festival activities becoming much more prominent, there is a clear need for the very best technical expertise to underpin the whole operation. Tom elaborates:
"A key element of Orbital's set up activity today involves connecting laptops for multi-layered playback across the multiple productions. Stability is crucial to this as you cannot re-tech a show, and Orbital has a great reputation for this – it's one of the most important things they now do for us. We also benefit enormously from their West End experience, particularly as we have gone through the digital switchover and the issues surrounding this – we have some 65individual uses of radio mics across our venues, and we have some real challenges when it comes to handling the frequency spectrum."

2013 was the biggest and best Festival Fringe for Pleasance to date – a long cry from its first season 29 years earlier, comprising one theatre and eight shows. For the Pleasance and Orbital teams, this year was another reflection of a long and successful partnership that has been growing steadily over the past 20 years. Watch this space – planning for 2014 has started already!


For the Pleasance and Orbital teams, this year was another reflection of a long and successful partnership that has been growing steadily over the past 20 years.