One of my several side gigs is freelancing around town at various other theatres and venues when I am not buried up to my eyeballs in work at the Tulsa PAC. One of those other venues is the Guthrie Green, just up the street from the Tulsa PAC.

On September 5, I mixed an outdoor symphony show with the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra. Now, the Guthrie Green is just an outdoor park with a concrete stage area and a metal roof. There are no walls of any kind to help reflect the sound of acoustic groups out towards the audience. So, almost every group that performs there needs to be reinforced, and sometimes considerably. Luckily, the folks at The Guthrie Green invested in a nice PA system to facilitate a wide range of performance types, from touring rock and roll bands, to theatre performances, to symphony orchestras.

The house PA system is a Meyer M’elodie line array, with 6 cabinets per side, and three Meyer 650HP subwoofers per side. The system processor is a Meyer Galileo 616. And we occasionally use QSC K12s as front fills or side fills when necessary.

For this show, I triple miced the high string sections, i.e. three mics on Violins 1, three mics on Violins 2, three on violas, two on cellos, and two on basses. I don’t remember how many I had on the woodwinds, I think it was six, one mic for every two players, and four mics on the brass section, and four or five for the percussion. I had 36 or 37 inputs, as I remember. And, because of the number of inputs, we had to rent another console instead of using The Guthrie Green’s Yamaha LS9-32. We brought in an Avid Venue Profile (it didn’t hurt any that the Avid console sounds better than the LS9 and has DCA groups, which were extremely important for me to mix this show properly) and a selections of microphones to bolster the compliment of house mics that the Guthrie Green has. There were lots of low end condenser mics and some dynamics for the brass and percussion: Shure KSM 137s, Shure SM81s, Audio-Technica ATM450s, a pair of AKG C414-XLIIs and a few others that were unremarkable.

This was a very rushed five our long load in and set up. And I only had 15 minutes to do a sound check with the whole orchestra and get levels dialed in before their performance started. All in all, it was a good day, and everyone enjoyed the show!