QSC WideLines Provide Powerful Sound and Stability at Key West Songwriters Festival
Key West, FL (Aug 2013) --The Key West Songwriters Festival, reportedly the largest festival of its kind in the world, attracted more than 150 troubadours, including Jeffrey Steele, Paul Overstreet, Bob DiPiero and Lori McKenna, to the tiny Florida island this year. A Key West institution since 1996, the BMI-sponsored festival provides a five-day platform for country, folk, blues and rock songwriters to perform in their own right at some of the island’s numerous bars and music venues.
According to New Orleans native Glen Himmaugh, owner of Backstage*America/Sound of Key West, the shows—which are mostly free—take place at about two-dozen venues on the island. Himmaugh has been providing production for the festival for the past five years.
A longtime fan of QSC, Himmaugh has outfitted such island hotspots as the Smokin’ Tuna and Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville with QSC loudspeaker systems. For the smaller festival shows he used a pair of K12s and a pair of KSubs, and he reports: “We blow people away with how good it sounds.”
The key challenge in Key West is stable electricity, according to Himmaugh, and there are always daily power failures. “The electricity is so bad that I might be tasked with doing a concert for 1,000 people with one 20-amp circuit!” he says. “But I can put five K12s on a 20-amp circuit and not even worry about it.”
For the main events, which this year included Gary Clark, Jr. at Sunset Pier, Himmaugh deployed his WideLine-10 arrays. On the large outdoor Duval Street stage, he reported, “I had six WideLine-10s and four double-18 subs, with eight K12s on the stage as monitors, and the whole thing ran off of four 20-amp circuits from the roof of the building next door.”