Yorkshire Solar Sound

Held at the start of the summer festival season, Rough Beats is one of the UK's most unique festivals, and has lost nothing of it's atmosphere despite growing year on year.

This year, as we have done since the festival began, we provided the sound for the main tent - "The Aurora Stage".

We arrived on site after the main infrastructure had gone up and were fully set up and ready to go by the deadline for the council safety inspection. We have invested in new sound-level monitoring equipment which meant that we were in a good position throughout the weekend to liaise with the councils Environmental Health officers and the festival organisers in terms of keeping the sound levels below the required threshold for the license. Those who have organised larger events will know how crucial this is in terms of gaining the license to run the event.

With the main stage all set up and ready to go, we also supplied a small solar powered PA system for the Treehouse Cafe who were catering at the festival so that they could play music to their customers. We also provided low powered ambient lighting for the tent which was also solar powered. We set this up in such a way that it "just worked" which meant they could focus on their customers without worrying about the lights going out.

A particular quirk of this festival is that it is powered by a generator (due to luxurious lighting specifications and significant beer-refrigeration requirements) which in previous years had proved somewhat unreliable. With this in mind, for this year's event we had invested in an uninterruptable power supply to protect key pieces of equipment in the event of power failure such as the 24 track hard disk recorder with which we recorded the acts appearing on the main stage. We also had a lot of backup equipment with us so that in the event of a more sustained power failure, we could switch the PA to being powered by the sun instead so the event could continue whilst repairs were made to the generator.

The festival was long sold out, and the sunny weather for the first few days ensured that a great time was had by all. From a technical perspective, the whole weekend passed without a hitch and we were able to provide continuous sound from first thing in the morning until the last note was played in the evening.

Once the last band had finished playing on the Sunday night, we immediately began the task of derigging the stage and within 3 hours we had fully dismantled the PA, packed all of the equipment into the van and had our vehicle offsite.