Hire and events production company Stagelight has played a prominent role in the Dutch corporate events market for many years. Now aiming for an equally strong share of the public events and tour sound sectors, it has been expanding its equipment portfolio accordingly – including the recent purchase of four SSL Live consoles.

Having taken three Live L500 consoles and a Live L300 console from Audio Electronics Mattijsen (AEM), company MD Jacco van der Heijden says: ‘For us, SSL complemented our own strategy of always delivering to the highest possible standards – a global reputation for excellence, teamwork and reliability are key to Stagelight operations. We had to find a brand that would fit with our high-quality inventory. It had to be superior in all respects. No discussion... the choice was easy.As well as serving as Senior Project Manager Audio and Technical Operations Manager for Stagelight, Robert de Lorijn is also FOH Engineer for Matt Simons – a US Artist who has found a large following in The Netherlands. And it was Simons who provided the first opportunity for De Lorijn to use the L500 on a big stage. In a single weekend Simons played the Brussels Summer Festival (Belgium) and the Strandfestival Zand (Netherlands) to a 35,000 audience.

‘We had already done rehearsals and pre-programming with the console, but of course it’s always a different thing when the audience is there,’ De Lorijn says. ‘You get the chance to compare your sound with the other bands, compare it to the sound you are used to on another console, and you get to see the reactions of the other engineers. The SSL made a big impression.

‘Singers always sound better when they smile,’ he says. ‘For me, the SSL makes every input smile. I think that’s the best way to put it. You can hear the detail, you can focus in on every instrument, and the whole mix is ten times better than you’re used to.

‘I also love that there is always something useful in front of your hand – left or right. Sometimes I forget about the technical stuff and get carried away with the music, but my hands always find the control I need, and it’s not always on the same part of the console. Sometimes I operate the EQ on the main screen, sometimes on the little screen, or sometimes I use the encoders.’

Two of the Stagelight L500s are now due out on tour with the Dutch Royal Airforce Orchestra (Orkest Koninklijke Luchtmacht). The other two, an L500 and an L300, have become part of Stagelight’s primary hire stock – and are busy training freelance engineers.

‘At the moment we are running short training sessions almost every day for top Dutch engineers,’ De Lorijn confirms. ‘If the desk is already prepared for them, we can get them working in just a few minutes. When I explain how to prep’ it themselves – starting with a blank file, building the console the way they want it to be, and starting a mix – the training takes between 30 and 45 minutes, which is really fast.’

SSL Live set-up can be done on the console itself, or with the SSL SOLSA Application – a PC-based online and offline remote control and editing application that offers full console configuration and Show File creation.

Roland Mattijsen-of AEM is confident that Stagelight’s needs could not have been fulfilled by anything else: ‘The Live series ticks all the boxes for Stagelight. It’s able to handle very complex events with high channel counts and lots of buses. They have been confident enough not only to put two L500s on a very important tour with the Royal Airforce Orchestra, but also to add another L500 and L300 to their hire stock. That’s a fantastic endorsement of the product and we’re very happy to be working with Stagelight on this.’

The Royal Airforce Orchestra is currently rehearsing for its new tour at the Airforce base studios. For this project, Stagelight has Ted Masseurs on FOH, Jurgen Burdorf on monitors, and the Stagelight Project Manager, Jan Willem Vos. The L500 monitor console supplies 12 stereo wireless and eight stereo wired IEMs, 22 ‘hotspot’ wedges, four additional wedges, and a ‘butt-kicker’. The response from the musicians was as overwhelmingly positive as it was from the crew.

‘The show was in prep for a week,’ reports De Lorijn. ‘On the first day of rehearsals with the whole orchestra – the Director is there, the whole production team is there – I got a text from the engineer. All it said was wow…’

‘It’s a space they know really well, and of course they know the orchestra really well. To get a ‘wow’ under those circumstances is the best response we could hope for... Even better than anybody expected.’

More: www.solidstatelogic.com