 How can you get crystal clear sound in the middle of a muddy field? My name's Chris Tapplin, I'm the sound manager at Greenman Festival and we're on the festival site which is the Glowinsk Estate in mid Wales in the Breckin Beacons. The first job is booking sound systems that are appropriate, trying to provide good quality sound for the audiences and also provide what the bands need. And I also deal with noise control on the site and off the site so that's looking at health and safety for people who are working but also for the audience obviously and looking at the impact, the noise footprint of this festival on the surrounding area. We're quite lucky here because as you can see it's a very unpopulated area, there are houses in the distance that there is an impact on. I try and measure that and keep it within reasonable limits and liaison with the council. And I also have another guy who works with me whose job is primarily taking measurements and doing a noise report at the end of the festival to see what's happened. It's been very good here, we don't touch wood, we've never actually had any complaints about anybody, that's very unusual for a festival site. So what we're going to do on this stage is we fly the PA in the air on chain motors to give it some height so we can kind of fire down at people. We've got a nice shape here, the place is a bowl, so you get people sitting on the banks up here so I need to have sound hitting high enough up. We've got a very specific line array system which is designed, you can move the angles so you can point at a place and say yeah we're hitting that, it's going to sound good there. So this is the main stage structure, obviously that's the performance area. And these two towers at the side are where the PA is going to hang, you can see the eye beam at the top there which is the actual weight bearing member. So we'll hang a chain motor from there and drag the PA up and that gives us the ability to throw sound further away from the stage rather than having it all just focusing down here. So there'll be racks of ant racks across here, speakers up there and then we're going to divide this stage about half way across and this back area will be used for a change over space. So the next band that's coming on will set up in this area while that band's performing and then we'll swap them around. Hiring sound equipment is very expensive. Our system there, there'll be 10 boxes of JBL Vertec aside. The speakers have a degree of sound irradiation which is their kind of hotspot which is 90 degrees. That's not quite going to cover the area right in the centre there so we'll put some little infills in there just to give people in the centre a bit more top end so they, because obviously they're going to be the biggest fans right there for them, you want to make sure they can hear it okay. The big thing for us is on Wednesday when the PA companies arrive with all their systems and put them in place and then they'll run up the systems and we'll do system checks. We'll walk around, we'll take frequency readings and they'll use their ears and they'll tune the PA's to the best possible sound they can get. And on Thursday we'll have all the back line instruments coming in so we'll distribute those to the steel stores behind the stages in the right place. All the health and safety warning signs, you know, you need to wear hearing protection in these different places. And then we start to get artists on site so then it's into the thick of just dealing with their bits and pieces. Chris books a PA company who makes sound for the show. I'm Tony Zabo and I am the sound systems engineer for Adler Boreo. What we have here is monitor position and these are the three guys and girls that will be looking after the stage. Kenny's going to be looking after the console, the mixing console here and he will provide the sound for all the artists on stage. There's speakers all over the stage and every artist gets their own dedicated mix. Laura and Michael will be looking after the logistics of making sure that when the changeover happens from a solo artist to a full band that there's the right things on stage, the right number of microphones and wedges, wedges are our little speakers. So we have a short changeover, we do a mad panic and then we check it with the front of house. Front of house provides the sound for the audience so once it's okay there then we go and we do a shot. What is Tony's background? I was at university studying physics strangely enough, applied physics. A few friends formed a band and I just started doing sound for them. It was probably the equivalent of this little speaker here, one per side and a little tiny mixing console and I probably earned $5 a show. I was at university that was enough. There's a lot of physics in sound. From the acoustics which are waves we have radio mics, RF waves. There's a lot and a lot of people both with RF and acoustics think it's black magic. They think that you've got to learn a few things and that's what happens. I mean I can see speakers and this is a subwoofer and this is a high mid cabinet and if they're in a certain shape I can look at it and I can pretty well get an idea of the coverage pattern and the low being and all that. How does Tony decide how many speakers he'll need? Basically I can get on the front of the stage and I can get the measurements of the room and I've got 3D modelling software and I'll do a model of the room and then I will put the speakers in that model and then I will adjust the speaker system, the angles and the height and the direction and so on. I will adjust that to try and get the most even coverage for all of the audience area. For instance the people in front of the stage are within 5 to 10 metres of the stage. The people at the top of the hill are just over the 100 metre mark. It's a massive difference. We know that the majority of the audience is going to hear it well because they're the people right in front. And the thing is that sometimes people don't want to be in that 100 dB or 96 dB. They want to be able to talk and still hear. So if you go over there you can still hear but it might be 360 dB down. So you don't necessarily want to try and fix that and if an event organiser comes along and says, oh no it's not loud enough over there, it's like okay well I guess they did want it loud. I'll turn that up then.