Draughon Brothers Inc. Ran Superb Sound at Suwannee Rising
I mention sound early and often in many of the articles I have written about bars, concerts, and festivals. Most often, it gets mentioned because it is often too loud. Unnecessarily loud. Painfully loud on occasion.
At the inaugural Suwannee Rising Music Festival in Live Oak April 4-5-6, I specifically praised the sound crews:
Also, the sound was the best I’ve ever heard at SoSMP, and that includes 36+ festivals there. With minor exceptions, it was not too loud, often a complaint about the Amphitheatre. And Receptor Sound and Lighting crushed over at the Porch Stage.
However, I did not know the crew who ran sound for the Amphitheater. I do now. Draughon Brothers Inc. out of Fayetteville NC were the company that provided the sound and lighting for the Amphitheater Stage. This was their first project at SoSMP, and they said, “We are thrilled to have been a part of such a wonderful event.”
The conversation went further as Kelvin Draughon explained:
One of the things we pride ourselves on is keeping the SPL in the pocket. We felt that after looking at the site a month or more before the Festival began, it was important to take careful steps to cover the area like a glove but not to allow the sound to build up anywhere.
Well, that went WAAAY over my head, so I asked for an explanation. I thought this was awesome:
Oh my…I did write that ‘in code.’ My bad.
The goal to keep SPL (Sound Pressure Levels) ‘in the pocket’ is a goal for most sound engineers. Some bands and sound engineers are strangely willing to drive SPLs to a point that is simply not enjoyable to the audiences. Luckily, not one band at the festival asked for more volume because, as we all agree, fidelity and audience enjoyment are truly the key for every band we encountered at the Suwannee Rising Festival.
We pay close attention when deploying a sound system to arrange the PA in such a manner that everywhere there is a chair, there is a speaker pointed at that chair, if you will. Liken this to an architect specifying 400 50-watt lights in a large room instead of two 10,000 watt lights. The light output is essentially the same, but, in the in the latter, the 10,000-watt lights would blind you. The 400 lights evenly distributed produce a warm even light that is not a nuisance to anyone.
Many PA providers employ line array sources that are designed to throw sound over great distances. They are absolutely perfect for this application.
Once I visited the SoSMP about a month prior to the Festival, I quickly decided that for the Amphitheater Stage the line array approach would simply not produce the result we strive for: even coverage that is not excruciating in volume in the ‘hot spots’ (i.e., lighting example above). My professional opinion was that a different approach was the better option for the Amphitheater Stage. We chose to use a point source approach. Our approach was to deploy a high-quality speaker system that allowed the sound to be evenly distributed over a very wide (not deep) area and not HAVE to turn the volume up to get sound pressure (not necessarily high quality) to the side seats.
Makes sense to me! I certainly hope we hear Draughon Brothers Inc. at the Amphitheater again, and soon!
