Band/Choir portable acoustic shells

NickVon

Well-Known Member
What is the preferred method of arranging these on stage. It seems previously the school has spread them out with a full "Shell" gap between each one? I presume this works in some way a little bit. But how much better would they work all next to each other behind the choir risers, even if they are not spread as wide on stage?
 
Ideally, they should be set up end to end with no gaps. That is more of a predictable surface that more evenly reflects the sound of the entire group. If you do not have enough shell units to go behind all of the risers, then each solution is less than ideal.

~Dave
 
I meant to comment on this and forgot.

We have a set of 6 Wengers from the late 70s, they look like this:


There's a curve baked into the fliptops, and we generally set them up as either 5 or 6 following the curve, though occasional an act will have so many people on stage that we have to put them in a straight line and take the hit; we do still leave the tops flipped up then, even though they don't touch. That's probably how we'll set up for the Tampa Bay Pride Band this weekend, though I don't know if we'll do the 6-color rainbow uplight on them.
 
Okay, there's a few schools of thoughts:

1. Attach them side to side to create a full shell behind the group with no curve. The sound will be reflected directly out.

2. Arrange them in a arc to focus the sound at the conductor

3. Leave gaps in between to allow for focus of the sound but some dissipation if the group is too loud.

4. (My personal choice as a musician) Move them to tune the group. Reflect sounds that you need to be reflected (think french horns with the bell facing backwards) and let sounds you don't necessarily need reflected dissipate. It's not VISUALLY attractive, but there's some conductors that prefer to hear the group and don't care much what the group looks like.

I've worked with choir directors that want all of the above, so it's a personal choice. Work with whoever is the conductor and let them hear the differences.
 
Turns out our shells don't have an "angled" wing at the top. After initially doing 3 sets of 2 straight sections, I was overruled and have just distributed them in a curve evenly around the back of the choir with about 2 feet between them. I feel like it's mostly decorative right now.
 

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