CODA Audio Follows The Script

Irish pop-rock band The Script took to the road last year in support of their most recent ‘Satellites’ album. The tour of arenas in the U.K. and continental Europe saw the band return to live performance with a high-energy show which typified their approach to pushing boundaries. Added to the band’s legendary collection of anthemic tunes, the boisterous hip-hop and funk rhythms of their new material made for a memorable show. Event technology specialists Adlib have supplied audio to The Script for nearly fifteen years, and have seen the band develop into global superstars. Adlib once again chose a CODA Audio system to meet the needs of a tour which played to venues that varied in capacity from 6,000 to 23,500 fans.

System Design

Adlib’s Marci Mezei designed the system and served as the System Engineer for the tour. He deployed the AiRAY with flown subs:

“Richy Nicholson, our Account Manager, involved me at a fairly early stage in the system design for the tour. My personal preference is for flown sub-arrays, as I like how they compare in distribution to ground-only sub systems, which typically overwhelm the front rows with excessive energy when trying to reach the back rows. Flown sub arrays easily deliver nice, smooth sub energy to the back rows. "

“The flown loudspeakers were positioned in an imaginary ‘arc’ to ensure all the time relationships remained as close to each other as possible. This was done to achieve the smoothest overlap between the main, side, and 270° hangs."

“We engaged closely with the lighting and video teams to obtain a consistent trim height around 10m from the ground, which offered the best compromise between sightlines and low frequency coverage. The subs on the ground were able to ‘fill-in’ and add low end to the first few rows which were underneath the coverage pattern of the flown subs.”

The CODA Audio system, which was scaled to accommodate the variety of venue sizes but retained its concept throughout, typically comprised (per side) main hangs of 16 x AiRAY, 8 x SC2-F extensions, and 8 x SCP-F flown subs. Side hangs were 14 x AiRAY, with 12 x CiRAY as 270° upstage hangs. On the ground, 2 x SCP-F subs per side filled the low end for the first few rows, 8 x equally spaced HOPS8 acted as frontfills across the downstage edge, with a further 3 x APS per side as outfill to cover any gaps towards the side of the stage.