From the classroom to the big stage – 6K UNITED! Making this dream come true.
Every year, the creators of the program create gigantic choir concerts with about 6,000 schoolchildren filling the biggest halls of the tour in Germany. 6K UNITED played in 2024! Eight performances in six cities (Berlin, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Munich, Mannheim and Hanover), including choral conductors, vocal coaches and a 17-piece live band. At 6K UNITED! The hall becomes a stage – and requires a sophisticated sound system concept that takes on both monitoring duties for the singers in the stands and provides the right space for the audience. For this purpose, Melodus GmbH, as a general technical service provider, relies on a combination of classic line array stereo sound and high-speed audio for pre-fills, combined with the Jacktrack smart tracking system.
As the singers, including their respective voice coach on stage, were tightly clustered left and right in the stereo panorama, Melodus had to find an alternative way for those nearby to be reproduced from DAS Audio with corresponding clarity by the stereo sound system. To ensure the correct placement of the field sound system in the front row of the audience: “In a classic fill fill system you usually have two options: you can switch all the speakers to mono or you can switch the left and right,” explains Oliver Schottov of Melodus management. Director and FOH Engineer at 6K UNITED! Tour. “While no stereo image is produced in mono, the second variant displays a stereo image that changes depending on the position of the seat and is distorted.”
Deep audio monitoring
The solution: Melodus connected eleven front-fill speakers to a speaker bar via the CODA SPACE HUB immersive audio processor and automatically positioned sound objects along two 3D audio axes (X/Width and Y/Depth). “With the combination of tracking and high-speed audio, the image of voice coaches and instruments also works very well in the front row of the audience,” affirms Oliver Schotow.
Melodus uses Jacktrack Smart for 6K UNITED! Touring the audio industry for the first time. Ingrid Kreutzer from Melodus was responsible for setting up the changing arena: “We used eleven anchors, most of which were permanently mounted on the lowest row elements and installed on dollies during transport.” 6K United! Nine rows in the hall – five to monitor the singers around the stage and four to the audience sound system. “So we’re up and running with the system very quickly in every new hall.”
A perfect symbiosis: Jactrack and GrandMA3 for precise light tracking
In addition to the audio tracking, Jacktrack signals were also used for the followspot lights of composer Professor Fabian Senholz and two voice coaches, Lena and Peri, so that they could be seen perfectly by the thousands of children in the hall. At all times. For this purpose, in addition to the OSC signals for the audio, the pan/tilt values for the moving lights calculated in JackTrack Smart were sent to the lighting system via sACN. “It was plug and play everywhere,” confirms Boris Kasser, responsible for GrandMA3’s full range of lighting design and operation. Eventually, a total of eight moving lights were automatically activated to track the three people on stage. Kaeser maintained full control of all devices at all times via the GrandMA3 interface and was able to play his notes with or without monitoring using separate jacktrack mounts. In addition to the GrandMA3 full-size, two GrandMA3 processing units were used for M higher power and parameters, and a GrandMA3 light was also available as a backup console.
