Located on St-Denis Street in the heart of Montreal's famous Latin Quarter, the St-Denis Theatre is one of the most modern and prestigious cultural arts venues in the city. A major downtown Montreal landmark, the theatre boasts two halls with a seating capacity of 933 and 2,219, respectively. Equipped with all the latest sound and lighting technologies needed to keep up with today's sophisticated and demanding audiences, the 2,219-seat St-Denis Theatre recently had the opportunity to use a Yamaha RIVAGE PM7 Digital Audio Console for a production of the Broadway-inspired musical, Fame. Solotech of Montreal provided the console.
The Yamaha PM7 was used by front of house engineer, Maxime Lambert, who was hired by Juste pour rire as the engineer for the production of Fame.
“Solotech strongly suggested that we take a look at the PM7 as it fulfilled most of our requirements,” said Lambert. “After a moment of reflection, the show’s sound designer Colin Gagné and I decided that it could be the right fit for us. We used many Yamaha mixers before, mostly CL5, QL5, and M7CL. Solotech provided us a day in their warehouse for training by Yamaha systems application specialist Kevin Kimmel.”
Lambert cites several features that were an important aspect of the console mix for Fame: the new sub-scene management and the multi-user interface. “Having the possibility for two operators on one control surface at the same time is really useful when you have 100+ inputs to manage,” said Lambert. “Another great feature of the PM7 is to have the option of choosing the send point of each channel to any mix. It made mixing monitors from front of house a lot easier. We had the Rupert Neve Designs EQ810 and MBC4 multi-band compressor on all of our mix busses and mostly used the Yamaha SPX reverb for effects. The Rupert Neve Designs 5045 also came in handy when needed.”
24 Sennheiser MKE1 with SK 5212 were used for the actors with a total of 40 wireless inputs and more than 50 wired microphones for the band. Serge Rodrigue was hired by Juste pour rire as the wireless technician for Fame and has previously worked on many of Juste pour rire musical productions.
“When I say that the Yamaha RIVAGE platform is a powerful tool for musical productions, I mean that it has almost everything that’s needed to achieve the highest level of control over audio reproduction in a live environment in a fast and efficient way,” said Lambert. “It is easy to use, straight forward, fast, and sounds great. During the creation of a musical production, you need to be able to react quickly to the demands of the director, the actors, and the band. We never had to stop during the rehearsal period because of anything to do with the sound and that’s mostly due to the reliability of the PM7. I never had a doubt that the PM7 would deliver.”
