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The annual Courage Festival is one of the biggest youth gatherings in Germany. The festival is the offspring of an initiative by councils in North Rhine-Westphalia, which established a youth network to discourage the region's young people from antisocial behaviour, broadcasting a message of tolerance and civil responsibility.
The festival was established in 2001 with an audience of 3,000, offering live music alongside discussion and information forums designed to help and inform the region's youth, while inviting them to have a proactive say in their affairs. Since then it has steadily grown, with 12,000 attending the 2006 event, held in September in the grounds of Schloss (Castle) Moyland, on the German/Dutch border.
Headlined by American boy band US5, the line-up included a range of acts from German television talent contest Deutschland sucht den Superstar. Local production company BLL approached Carsten Eichstädt of CE-Veranstaltungstechnik to act as technical manager and provide his Turbosound Aspect® system for the festival's PA, plus a range of other Turbosound enclosures.
The main system comprised nine TA-880H per side (flown three wide by three high), eight TA-880L as a centre mono bass cluster under the stage and six TSW-718 subs per side (stacked two wide by three high). Two TQ-445DPs were deployed for nearfills, with four TQ-308SPs for outfill. Power and processing came from three Aspect amp racks and six LMS-D26 processors.
On stage, six TFM-450 wedges were used for primary monitoring, with four Floodlight TFL-760Ht and four TSB-118 as sidefills, plus two QLight™ TQ-445DP and two TQ-425DPs for drum and key fills.
The weather was fine with no wind, but a major audio challenge came from the audience demographic. "As it's a youth festival, the audience is arranged so that everyone can see the stage," says Carsten. "This means the smallest kids are at the front. But, by default, this means that they are also the youngest. So we had to make sure that they were protected from sound levels being too high, yet allow people further back to still hear the music."
Another thing for the audio team to take into account was that the parents of the youngest children were accommodated to the side - in front of the PA, where things can get very loud. However, here Aspect's superb control came into its own.
"We solved this problem by ensuring there was 12-15db between the horizontal angles of the three rows of flown cabinets, quietest at the bottom and loudest at the top," says Carsten. "Because of Aspect's excellent directability and control, it was much easier than I anticipated to have the sound louder at distance."
"The Aspect system worked really well... but Aspect works very well in the open air every time! Thorsten Klamutzke, the general managing director of Passepartout Event Agency (the event's promoter), was at the festival and he was really impressed with the system's performance. He was especially surprised at how the children at the front of the audience were protected from the loudest volume levels." |