Frequently Asked Questions

Whether it be a small garden party or a large local festival, performers and staff must be kept safe

Small outdoor partys

If performing outside, shelter such as a gazebo or awning must be provided to shelter both equipment and performers from the weather.

• A 3x3m Gazebo can accommodate up to a duo or small trio without a drum kit. A full 4 piece band will need at least a 4x4m or 3×4.5m. For a larger community event a 3x6m minimum is recommended.
• The ground must be dry and firm, so grass is fine as long as it is short and on firm soil, otherwise a solid and firm performance area must be provided. Longer grass and ‘soft’ ground can cause equipment to fall over and is a safety hazard.
• There must be no dry grass, hay, straw, or any other easily combustible material in and around the performance area (or generator, see below).
• Any shelter must be suitably fixed to the ground with guide ropes or weights, and at least two side should be available if either strong sun or moderate rain is expected.

Stageing

Staging takes your event up a notch, but regardless of the staging provider – both professional companies and local builder scaffold stages – safety is paramount.

• Any stage higher that 40cm must have railings on exposed sides, excluding the front.
• There must be a entry point to the stage in the structure at either the rear-left or rear-right corner for musicians and staff to come on and off. For more professional setups, an ‘in’ side and an ‘out’ side helps speed changeovers and eases access.
• Any stage over 40cm must have strong and stable steps from the ground to the stage. Stacked pallets and other makeshift steps or platforms are unlikely to be suitable unless built extremely sturdily.
• Custom build stages, such as those from scaffold companies or even ‘home built’ using pallets must have a near-continuous hard surface. For example, covering pallets with a rug is not acceptable as the surface underneath will have large gaps. Covering pallets with boarding to provide a continuous hard surface is fine, and tiled scaffold boards with very small gaps is also fine.

Professional marquees

A professional marquee or stretch tent is the ideal way to give your event a focus with shelter from the weather and can be transformed to suit any mood or theme, but even these professional setups need some considerations.

• Make sure the height of the marquee at the far sides of the stage is high enough for speaker stands and lighting. Larger events will require higher speakers towers and lighting trusses, and without enough tent height, sound and lighting may be compromised, or in extreme cases some speakers and lighting cannot be used at all.
• If using a stretch tent, ensure the tent is stretched equally at each side of the stage, as it is very easy to have varying heights at each tent support. This will result in lop-sided sound and lighting and look botched.
• If using staging with the speakers and lighting set on the stage, the stage height needs to be added to the total equipment height. A 0.5m stage with 3m speaker towers for a larger event will need a minimum of 3.5m beyond each side of the stage.
• At Heathfield Events, our speakers towers are either 2m or 3m high, so ensure there is enough height at the far sides of the stage to fit this height under the marquee or stretch tent, and add the stage height if required.

Power

We will tell you how much power we need in Amps, and typically is between 16Amps for smaller events and up to 63Amps for the largest events we can deliver, which includes on-stage power for the musicians equipment.

Many events will have access to a high-capacity fixed supply, such as those found on a farm, however if this is not available it is your responsibility to source a suitable generator. Food and drink vendors and other festival activities may also require generator power, so this is better arranged at the festival-level anyway.

We have suitable infrastructure to plug into 3pin (blue) 32Amp and 16Amp supplies from the mains or a generator, but if the supply is 63 amp, or any 3-phase supply, you will need ensure a converter to produce single phase (blue 3pin) 32 Amp or 16 Amp socket is available.

The supply must be within 15 meters of the stage.

Generators

Generators are more suitable for many events, however there are several factors to consider:

Power rating

Their power rating is typically measure in kVA (kilo Volt Amps) and may not be accompanied by the more familiar kW or Amps rating, however kVA maps to Amps approximately as:

• 5 kVA = 21 A
• 10 kVA = 33 A
• 15 kVA = 50 A
• 20 kVA = 69 A

The calculation for this is (PF * VA) / V = Amps, where V = 240, PF = 0.8

Explaining what the power factor means is beyond the scope of this FAQ, but should be applied to kVA values over 5kVA.

Run time

Run time is very important otherwise you may have to turn everything off mid-show, refuel, and restart everything (yes, this has really happened!).

Run times are often quoted at different load values:

• 12 hours at 50% load
• 9 hours at 75% load
• 6 hours at 100% load (running at 100% load it NOT recommended)

Ensure the generator can run for the entire day’s event + 2 hours, so if needing to deliver 32Amps for 12 hours, a 20kVA would be ideal. These are often described as ‘long run’.

Fuel

Smaller generators may use petrol, while larger generators tend to be diesel. In the height of summer with dry grass and a very hot generator, refuelling with petrol can be a major safety issue as it is much more easily ignited if spilled.

Diesel still needs to be handled carefully but is a safer fuel. It also is more efficient so a generator will run for longer on the same fuel (see run time, above).

Power connections

Generators come with a variety of ‘commando’ style sockets so if there are options, please consider the following.

• Single phase (3pin) blue sockets of 32Amp and 16Amp are what is required
• Yellow 110v sockets are of no use whatsoever to most people in the event industry and are mainly used for building tools and machinery.
• If its a RED 32Amp, or any 63Amp socket, adapters to any blue socket will need to be provided

Noise

Generators can noisy so always try the one with with the lowest value, such as 75 dB.

The noise value is often quoted with a distance, such as “Noise Level at 7m = 75 dB”, so a noisier generator can be used if located a good distance away or shielded from the stage and audience.

Off-ground installation

Larger generators will often be elevated in their design, however smaller generators may be designed to sit on the ground. Many “open frame” generators sit on the ground.

It is important for safety reasons to have the generators off the ground, particular in high summer, as just the temperature of the metal chassis could cause dry grass to ignite. Elevated on several pallets is sufficient, and ensure the ground around the generators is kept wet.

Final Power Recommendations

Picking the right generator for a live music festival is a bit of an art as more factors need to be taken into account that just running a food van, but the following points should make it easier:

• A suitable fixed mains supply is always preferred, and must be upto 15m from the stage
• If using a generator, get a diesel-fuel generator for safety reasons and a (typically) longer run time
• A larger capacity generator will enable it to run longer as it will run with a lower overall load, will often be quieter, and will handle surges better.
• We require blue sockets on the generator, which are single phase 16 Amp or 32 Amp. The generator supplier will need to provide adapters if the generator only has red sockets. We cannot use 100 volt yellow sockets whatsoever.
• Ensure the generator is installed away from combustible materials – including potentially being elevated off the ground, and must be located up to 15m from the stage.
• It is your responsibility to ensure any generator works as we are not qualified to interfere or otherwise attempt to fix them.

Things to avoid:

• Multiple smaller generators are NOT sufficient. These will require frequent refuelling which is a safety risk, and introduce the possibility of having to switch-off equipment in order to switch generators (again, yes this has really happened!)
• Multiple generators that can each run for the required event duration are fine.
• Many smaller generators can often support powering electric welding equipment. These have extra controls and dials that are often dirty and in our experience can be unreliable due to the environments they are often used in. However, if it is clean and well maintained it should be fine.

It is very common for artists to perform with backing tracks, and thus need a way to play them during their performance. While simple on the surface, there are many ways to do this with various pros and cons for each. We can work with you in the following ways, but please always speak to us about your requirements:

1. Professional playback device with jack or XLR outputs
   You control your professional device and control the songs as you want.
   Pick the songs in real-time, the order, you use the correct versions, skip songs, and talk between songs as needed. The audio is provided as jack or XLR connections, with laptops with interfaces, samplers, or ‘SPD’s’ being common in these scenarios. This is by far the preferred option as it provide professional quality and reliability with minimal issues and faster setup.
2. Your own consumer device with a 3.5mm headphone socket
   You control your phone or tablet to play your songs how you want.
   You can pick the order, you use the correct versions, talk between songs, and can skip songs as needed, all played from your device which has a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack socket . This means reasonable quality and reliability and good compatibility with sound systems without the expense of professional equipment.
3. USB drive to play songs directly from the mixing desk
   A more technical and less flexible solution, but often more suitable for a variety of reasons.
   Songs in WAV format are loaded onto the mixing desk ahead of time and triggered by the sound engineer.
   To play songs from a USB drive plugged into the mixing desk, the USB drive and songs must use the following specification:
   1. Ensure the USB drive is empty and formatted in FAT32.
      • If the USB drive is larger than 32GB you may need to use a custom tool to format it correctly.
   2. Ensure the songs are in WAV format, in 16bit or 24bit, using 44.1KHz or 48KHz sample rate, and in ideally in stereo.
   3. Prefix the songs numerically to ensure they are ordered as desired e.g:
      • “1 – The Blues.wav”
      • “2 – 10s silence.wav”
      • “3 – Another Song.wav”
   4. They will play automatically in the defined order, so if you want a noticeable gap between two songs, make sure you add a wav file of silence of the appropriate duration, and name it numerically as needed so the silence appears at the correct point in the playlist (see example above).
   5. Make sure you take the length of the silence into account when calculating the length of your set. If the playlist overruns, the sound engineer will miss the last song(s).
4. USB cable direct to your laptop
   We can plug your laptop directly into the mixing desk so all sources can appear individually.
   This enables a much richer integration, and for example., multiple audio source from your laptop, perhaps playing back from a DAW, to appear as separate sources on the mixing desk. Ideal for those with multiple instruments, cues and click etc that cannot provide separate analogue feeds.
   However, this is limited by the distance between the playback laptop and the mixing desk as USB has a maximum length of only a few meters before glitches arise. This is also only possible if the USB socket on the mixing desk is not being used for other purposes.
5. Bluetooth
   As a backup option, a high-quality Bluetooth receiver is available to connect your device to so you can play the songs from your device. This is stereo only and may be suseptable to interference, if for example your device chooses to join a different Bluetooth receiver during your performance.
6. Dante / Waves SoundGrid
   Provide separate audio feed sources over a network
   On the off-chance you have Dante or WSG software installed on your device, we can take these sources over an wired ethernet network. If you don’t know what Dante is, I wouldn’t worry 😊.

We also have the following advice:

• Playing back from a YouTube video is strongly discouraged in the strongest terms.
• Having the song file on your device is the way to go. This coulld be downloading the mp3 or wav from the online source, including using Spotify or Tidal’s ‘offline’ features.
• Always check before the event that your device can play the file truly offline by enabling ‘flight mode’ with all 3G, 4G, 5G & Wi-Fi radios off.

Other methods using connection adapters, Apple Lighting and USB-C are not available unless you provide an adapter, however these will remain potentially unreliable and of lower quality.