October 2018 brought me the honour of working as monitor engineer for the legendary Duane Eddy celebrating his 80th birthday with some UK shows. With the Richard Hawley band and special guests Imelda May, Albert Lee and Bruce Welch making guest appearances the shows were a musical masterclass. Lovely people, all excellent musicians.
FOH engineer was Francoise Le Moignan.
Wigwam Acoustics supplied Digico desks, RF and monitors.
A couple of last minute arena shows for Mariah Carey to finish the year off nicely!
Vision mixing and racking cameras for live imag screens on Mariah’s only UK dates this year at London’s O2 Arena and Manchester Arena.
Flown LED Imag screens were Infiled ER 5.9mm.
Just completed Collabro’s 2017 Home Tour. Dual role as LED Screen Tech and Audio & Video playback. 32sqm of LED screen in various configurations to suit the differing venues. All playback was run off a combination of Apple Mac Pro towers for video and a pair of Mac Minis for audio. All computers running Qlab.
All video equipment was supplied by Live Event Productions.
October 2017.
Quick refresher course on Digico’s SD range of consoles. Thanks to Peppe at Autograph for a useful day and some bonus insights into the power of macros on these desks. Very quickly being converted to the power and versatility of the entire Digico range having mixed on them and supported them at several shows over this Summer.
Just completed the Alfie Boe and Michael Ball tour around the country houses of the UK. Working as Vision Mixer/Director/Crew Boss for newly formed Live Event Productions, this was an opportunity to put the Roe MC7 LED panels through their paces. I have to say, I’m very impressed. After many years of fighting to get good pictures onto LED screens these panels are the first ones where what leaves the vision switcher matches perfectly on the screen. The colour reproduction is excellent. I was able to confidently rack the cameras without having to compensate for what the screen processing and panels were doing. This led to consistently great pictures night after night, regardless of the light conditions.
Information for the bored:
Vision Mixer:
Cameras:
Screens:
I spent August 2012, 2013 & 2014 looking after the on site AV requirements for the BBC at their Edinburgh Festival site at Potterrow.
The main venue (blue tent) had 2 stacked projectors fed from a Kramer switcher. In the outdoor area a 15sqm LED screen provided information for visitors, recorded material and live relays from across the site. I also provided my own bespoke ticker software for easily updated messaging on the screen. The smaller, bar area (pink tent) contained 2 plasma screens with local and remote input facilities.
A Broadcast Pix system was used as the main switch and for keying and playback purposes. A Behringer X32 mixer was programmed with preset scenes to accommodate the local audio routing to the venue areas and green room, production office, radio OB’s and studio.
I designed the AV distribution between all the different zones, making use of a cat5 based system to allow video and audio to be routed from any location, to any location across the site. This allowed a level of versatility essential when dealing with multiple varied productions every single day.
In 2013, I provided public wifi access using Ubiquiti software and access points.
Little bit of politics.
Made the pictures appear on the big screen for this:
UK Premiere of Oscar nominated film The Salesman. (Guardian article)
Content was the main film along with other media for Amazon and the Greater London Authority (GLA).
For the technically curious:
70sqm of 6mm pixel LED screen.
2 Macbook Pro’s running Playback Pro (Main, Backup)
1 Blackmagic Design Teranex
2 Calibre LEDView 530 (Main, Backup)
A few bits of cables and other boxes.
A bit of an insight into the moments before a band hits the main stage at a festival. I mixed front of house for this show, if you zoom in on the tent at the end you might be able to see me.
My name is Peter Foulkes or Pete Foulkes, take your pick. I am a live sound engineer and have been for over twenty years. I served my time working for PA companies and as a house engineer, so I’ve probably mixed a few hundred bands over the years, maybe more.
For the last ten years I have mainly concentrated on working for bands directly as either their touring FOH engineer or Monitor engineer. I’m very loyal and tend to hang on to clients. This is great for me but does mean I don’t have a long list of bands I can reel off so I look more experienced. To be honest, I’ve always thought the kids with a list of 50 bands they have worked for might not actually be much good. Magnum, Uriah Heep, Lacuna Coil. That’s my recent list. Obviously there are other one offs covering other people’s regular gigs, but I don’t think it would be fair to claim them as my own.
Somehow I ended up doing lots of video work, still exclusively in the live events environment that I know well. I like to think a good knowledge of what everyone else on the stage is doing helps me integrate the traditional irritation that everyone knows as video more seamlessly into events. It’s not rocket science.