Byron Bay Bluesfest 2018

Byron Bay Bluesfest 2018 was on again this past Easter long weekend with a legendary scope of local and global musicians across the five stages including Tash Sultana, Ms. Lauryn Hill, John Butler Trio and Lionel Richie.

As in previous years, JPJ Audio provided a complete audio solution for the three main stages Mojo, Crossroads and Jambalaya. Mojo and Jambalaya had L-Acoustics K2 PA’s whilst Jambalaya had an L-Acoustics Kudo system.

“Mojo and Crossroads are almost identical tents and the PA’s we set up are identical too,” said Tristan Farrow, monitor engineer for the Mojo stage. “We have a systems guy who makes sure they mirror each other and there’s some consistency between the two. Jambalaya is a different beast altogether as they don’t have the A/B system of control that the Crossroads and Mojo have, they just have the one set of control consoles, one FOH console and one monitor console.”

The week before the festival load in, JPJ begin prepping the gear in their warehouse but planning starts a month before when information from the bands starts coming through.
The two main stages have an A and B system so there are two FOH consoles and two monitor consoles which means upstage line checks can be done with one whilst the FOH engineer can be loading show files on the other.

“It helps the half hour changeover time between acts to run smoothly,” added Tristan. “Of course in this day and age everyone wants to have their own equipment and that’s one of the main challenge faced every year by the JPJ crew. Some bring the whole package and some a little bit of their package, or they want us to provide a console for their sole use on the site.”

However most acts don’t require much special attention, they just need to be shown where the power is so they can set up and have the talented JPJ crew on hand to facilitate whatever they need.

Festival consoles this year were all Avid Profiles for FOH and Yamaha PM5D’s for monitors, on top of those there where a few floating DiGiCo SD7, DigiCo SD10, and Avid S6L consoles.
The venues may be tents but Tristan says that they can achieve spectacular results with the L-Acoustics K2 system.

“The K2 is great for this as it has a generous dispersion and the noise limits on the site allow us to have a good rocking band mix,” said Tristan. “The aim is to have every engineer walk away smiling thinking that was a great show. And there’s no reason not to be able to achieve that at Bluesfest.”