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Tube UK supports “Brighter Still” in Bradford

As Bradford rounded off a year as UK City of Culture in 2025, the team from Manchester-based audio specialist Tube UK provided audio for an audience of 10,000 at the spectacular closing performance “Brighter Still” in Bingley’s Myrtle Park, plus thousands more watching the event online.

Tube UK collaborated with sound designer Pete Malkin and Bradford Culture Company, the charity delivering this momentous year for the district. “Brighter Still”, presented over two evenings, was a mixed media show including large community choirs, solo singer performance, pre-recorded music, dancing and special effects, created and directed by Dan Canham and Emily Lim, featuring a community cast of over 200 people and nine professional performers. It was commissioned by Bradford 2025’s creative director Shanaz Gulzar.

The project involved the supply of a custom-designed in-the-round d&b PA system, comprising almost fifty channels of RF with personal radio mics, headset mics and handhelds, an extensive fibre network and a large Green-Go comms package covering a 120-metre range. Tube UK’s work was system-designed and project-managed by Melvyn Coote and implemented on site alongside Bradford 2025’s Director of Production Ben Pugh and Production Manager Hannah Blamire.

Coote and his sound crew battled the elements, including torrential rain, howling wind, mud, and freezing temperatures. The performance space was a 60 x 60 metre area with a circular stage in the centre, with four runways emanating from it, each at 90-degree angles to one another, and with a small circular stage or pod at the end. The action unfolded on all of these, with the 5,000 audience per show located in the four quadrants in between the runways completely surrounding the space.

A left and right array of d&b V-series with Y7P front fills and a single KSL-Sub was installed to cover each of the four quadrant areas. The four pods then had their own smaller systems to localise the voices on each pod, comprising six d&b E8 speakers rigged on 6-metre-high single poles for visual as well as sonic continuity. Each pod effectively used the main speaker systems - in the quadrants - as delays to support voices on the other pods that were up to sixty metres away, with the outward facing E8s of all the other pods supporting the localised sound image coming from its respective pod.

The sound emanated from the centre, and the pod speakers supported it, radiating outwards. This complex design was “the result of multiple strategies developed over several years to deliver the best and richest sound for this style of event”, says Coote. For control, Tube UK utilised a large network infrastructure with most of the backbone running via Netgear M4250-26G4F-POE AV Line network switches. The network architects were Adam Taylor and Harry Park.

The majority of the show sound came from a playback source and was composed by Warren “Flamin’ Beatz” Morgan-Humphries and Benji Bower, also the MD, with sound designed and programmed by Pete Malkin. This was all played out via QLab running on a pair of Mac Studio playback machines. The QLab file contained around 120 audio cues for the 45-minute show, with the Mac Studios playing via Dante into a Yamaha DM7-EX console. The console sent the audio stems to a Yamaha DME7 DSP engine, used here as a multi-point delay matrix system.

Noise central - amp rack and radio receiver city - was located underneath the west runway, and here, the incoming fibre audio control on Dante was distributed to three Yamaha Rio3224 stage boxes and three d&b DS10 network bridges with the latter feeding AES3 out to twelve d&b D80 and six d&b D20 amplifiers. The radio mic system included 42 personal mics and belt packs, of which there were a combination of Sennheiser SK6000s and SK5212s, with two SKM5200 handhelds. Each of the personal radio mics was fitted with a corresponding DPA6066 jawline headset mic.

There was up to 46 channels of RF, complete with an additional pair of handhelds. The Green-Go comms system needed to cover ten stage entry/exit points, all accommodating an ASM at each position, so a major challenge was to get these optimised, and in total, the system was running sixteen wireless and eight wired belt packs. It operated over a 120-metre range using six of Green-Go’s new Stride antennas.

Working alongside Coote, Taylor and Park was FOH audio operator John Redfern, who was mixing in an enclosed operating space, weaving in all the rapid-fire cues in a very short timeframe, while Coote provided the “live ears” on site. Matt Waltho was the PA technician, and Stuart McPartland was busy keeping on top of nearly fifty radio mics. The micing up process started at least two hours before each show.

“There were so many elements of this show that were non-standard, different and challenging”, comments Coote in summation. “The layout, the scale, the amount of radio mics involved, the location, the elements - and while our previous experience very much helped our approach and audio treatment in Myrtle Park, we still gained more knowledge in dealing with all aspects.”

(Photos: Bradford 2025/James Glossop/Pete Malkin/Tube UK)

www.tubeuk.com

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