With a career spanning more than three decades, Carlos Vives, is a Latin American entertainment icon. The five time Grammy award winner recently took to the stage in Sincelejo, Colombia for Fiestas del 20 de Enero. The outdoor event was held at Estadio Mochila, and put on by the City Of Sincelejo. 12,000 wildly excited fans filled the grounds to catch a thrilling Vallenato style performance by Vives and other Latin American hit makers - KVRASS, Maluma and Alfredo Gutierrez. C. Vilar Amplificacion Professional provided the complete sound, staging and lighting for the event.
Mauricio Vilar, FOH Engineer for Carlos Vives for the past four years, wanted to use the Adamson E15's for the performance. "Initially we had a production company proposing another brand of P.A. I had requested the E15's on the rider and insisted that they were used for the event." In the sound design process Vilar used the latest version of Adamson Shooter software (2.8.5) to nail down the setup, and glowingly stated the sound was "Extremely similar to the computer prediction".
24 Adamson E15's were flown above the stage in addition to eight SpekTrix boxes as front-fills. They used 16 stacked T21 subs to fill out the low end, with eight boxes placed left and right of the stage. Adamson M15's were used as stage monitors. The boxes were powered and controlled by Lab Gruppen amplifiers and Dolby Lake Processing.
In his outboard/effects rack Mauricio uses some tube processors for the main vocal, and a high end multi-channel FX. For this Carlos Vives performance he used a Digidesign Venue Profile, but he's got a short list of consoles he likes: "I think there are actually three very good consoles for FOH mix; Digico, Venue and Midas. Yamaha's very good for monitors."
He also did a live recording of the show: "I am half a live sound engineer, and half studio engineer. I spend a lot of time in the studio listening, in detail, to every instrument and every song. This is how I realize what microphone techniques to use, how to improve the show."
