THE TEAM:
- Kaur Kenk – Sound production and FOH mixing at Fotografiska stage
- Kaarel Tamra – FOH mixing
- Rasmus Maasen, Jarkko Voolaid – stage technician
“Tallinn International Festival Jazzkaar is tone of the name cards of Estonian culture and the biggest jazz festival of the Baltic states, taking place since 1990. With an interesting and original program and bold solutions, Jazzkaar makes the best jazz festival with the smallest budget in the North. The ten-day festival Jazzkaar is the most visited festival in Estonia where over 3000 foreign artists from 60 countries have performed.”
Working for Jazzkaar is nothing new to us but it is very special and we do enjoy it very much. Kaur started working with Jazzkaar already in 2013 when he was working for RGB Baltic and the relationship with Jazzkaar has been evolving ever since.
Kaur’s thoughts:
Project manager / FOH mixing engineer
For me the key point of a successful event is preparation. Jazzkaar had sent us all technical information and riders in advance so we had a pretty good overview of what’s coming. We had to supply a full technical solution except the sound system. All bits and pieces together we did load in two days in advance of the beginning of the festival and it was a wise decision as we discovered that the sound system had major problems and luckily we had plenty of time to have it fixed.
It is always a must to take time for verification of a sound system working condition, measurement and optimisation. As we set up our measurement system and tested each part of the sound system, we were able to find out that there were no filters and system tuning applied to the speakers, we could not run a festival in this condition. We asked the company who installed the speakers to fix the issues. After solving the critical issues we rearranged the speakers for proper 180 degrees coverage as the stage was open to three sides and added frontfill speakers where needed. When physical placement was fixed, we started to measure the system once again and aligned and tuned the system to our needs.
In a festival situation it is important to stay on schedule, our preparation work and sharp stage technicians made it easy and most soundchecks were finished before time so we could even help out the festival team with other tasks.