dBS Solutions Were thrilled to again be supporting The British Country Music Festival took place on the 3-5 September as the event returned from its year out in 2020 due to the pandemic. The three-day event was held at the Winter Gardens, Blackpool, and organisers put together a fantastic line-up. The three headliners were Ireland-based Nathan Carter, who took the top spot on Friday’s opening night, Wildwood Kin headlined on Saturday and Lisa McHugh lead the Sunday programme.
The Festival provided a platform to over 100 singers and musicians on five different stages throughout the weekend and every artist due to perform in 2020 were moved to 2021, to ensure that no performer lost out on the chance to appear at the festival.
The British Country Music Festival took place in the spectacular Winter Gardens indoor complex in the centre of Blackpool, a town with a heritage steeped in entertainment. The Victorian, gilt Empress Ballroom celebrating its 125th anniversary in 2021, is home to the festival’s main stage.
The dBS Team designed and supplied an all Martin Audio system this year featuring WPS as the main ground stacks with 6 boxes on each side, an out fill of 6 more WPS each side, stacked upon WS218’s in a cardioid gradient array. Infill duty was faithfully delivered by XD12s and more WPM’s double-stacked looked after the front fills. We made good use of the new lip fill settings for the WPM within Martin’s IKON amps. The system made light work of this acoustically complex room with FOH and systems engineer Danny Clare commenting “using the hard avoid feature on the venues roof space and on stage has cleaned up the sound out front immeasurably from previous years.” Our team, end client and of course the county audiences were all impressed at the audio coverage and intelligibility. On stage was looked after by Joe Baker on an SD12 and 12x XD15s as wedges monitors completed finally by WS18x as drum subs. Our team of Sam Edwards and Conar O’Brian looked after the patch for the weekend and ensured everything ran smoothly on stage whilst Danny headed up our team and mixed out front from an SD10 console. It was great to see this event return to our calendar, we love nothing more than delivering music festivals on time and to our usual high standard for our clients. Whether that’s inside in a tricky room or in a field, you can trust the team here at dBS Solutions with your live event. Special mention to Production Manager Toby, Ben and Cliff at the venue for looking after us during our time over in Blackpool. We are all looking forward to 2022!
