Page 21 - Guildhall School Coverage Book 2020/21

Guildhall engineer Sam Ziajka was responsible for networking, and the project was managed by Dylan Bate
Project Management. It was a two-day install by SSL followed by a further two days of training, and the team has
been doing two gigs a day since the start of September.
‘We hit the ground running and we were off,’ he says.

The full kit list that went into the School over those
truncated few months is headlined by its 32-fader
S300 console supported by a T25 Tempest Engine.
IO included SSL SB 32.24s, an A 16.D16 and an
A32 stagebox that sits in front of an Origin console
used primarily for jazz recordings and which sites it
on the Dante network. ‘And then we’ve probably got
70 or so non-SSL Dante devices that sit on there
too,’ Hepple says. ‘All our little classrooms have little
rack mixers in them basically with a Dante card in
the back. And we’ve got a whole bunch of two
channel in/two out Dante no-tricks boxes that we
can go and throw in a room.

‘The Origin allows me to teach students in a totally
analogue workflow in there, so I can teach them
proper gain structure and signal flow and all that kind of stuff,’ he continues. ‘So in one building we have this
absolutely glorious SSL analogue environment. And in the other building, we’ve got this equally glorious SSL
digital set-up. And the link between the two of them is just brilliant for us; it’s just really flexible.’

That flexibility has been the key to some of the School’s achievements in the past few months, with one of the
biggest impacts being made by the TeamViewer application on the S300 and the way it enables remote working.

‘On the S300 I can sit and mix gigs from home,’ says Hepple. ‘I’ve got a member of staff that’s currently having to
self-isolate, so they’re prepping all the show files and putting them on there. With a combination of wider access
Dante networks, the S300 and a couple of streaming plug-ins, we can do stuff from anywhere, it’s absolutely
brilliant. We had a big band gig last night and I mixed the audio from my home and one of my engineers vision
mixed from his home. That’s fantastic.’

The socially distanced orchestra that has been set up at the School is a marvel of logistics that has been enabled
by clever technology. 54 socially distanced strings sit in one room, with brass and percussion in another room, a
13-piece woodwind section in another (sitting three metres apart rather than the usual two due to the particulates
that the players exhale), and so on.
‘Our low-latency network has allowed for meaningful large ensemble performance to continue – a vital part of our
students development here at the school. We love it,’ comments Jonathon Vaughan, Vice-Principal & Director of
Music
The key to managing a nigh-on 100-piece orchestra
spread across numerous rooms is managing latency
on the Dante fibre network that is threaded
throughout the School’s buildings.
‘I can get anywhere on site to anywhere else on site
in 6ms audio wise, which is quicker than the real
world,’ says Hepple. ‘ If I am a conductor and I am
10m away from a trombone player at the back of the
room, there’s a 30ms lag between them. If I put a
close mic on that trombone player, I can get the
sound in the headphones of the conductor before it
would have got there in real time. And because the
audio is so quick, that allows me to catch up on the
video side of things. The video side runs at about
100ms latency, so you just have to do some
common sense things to accommodate that. I don’t have the conductor in the same physical space as any of the
instrumentalists for instance, so we are never fighting against the real world speed of light for a conductor’s
downbeat; everyone’s getting the video at the exact same time.’