DiGiCo integrates the history of Nashville's Woolworth Theater with audio

The new console DiGiCo SD12T ensures optimal sound in this historic civil rights space in the Tennessee state capital (EU), recently converted into a theater.

And 13 February 1960 and after being denied service at the Nashville Woolworth store because of their race, a group of students started a nonviolent movement to challenge the practice of segregation imposed for decades. They sat at the counter and refused to leave until they were served..

The resulting violent reaction, as well as the resulting national and international media coverage, contributed to reinforcing the incipient equal rights movement. At the moment, The store building is part of Nashville's Fifth Avenue Historic District and is registered as a historic site for this fact..

Recently, country music artist Chuck Wicks, together with its partners 615 Ventures and the investor and businessman Rob Bellenfant They acquired the historic Woolworth building and converted it into a venue for events and theater, con capacity for more than 750 personas.

The central axis of the audio system of the now called teatro Woolworth it's a console DiGiCo SD12T optimized for theatrical applications, as well as a D-Rack and one DMI-Waves card, all of this acquired and installed through the office of S&L Integrated.

“We chose the SD12T console because it can handle theater and music production equally well,” he says. Hayden Chipley, technical director and FOH engineer of the Woolworth Theater -. It was important that we had a table that could do both, with a lot of work surface, and that it had a compact form factor and size, without compromising power or performance”.

The theater has hosted its first original production, Shiners, created and co-starring Wicks, and many more are planned. “DiGiCo SD12T is playing an important role in making Woolworth an important place in Nashville”, recalca Chipley.

Among the advantages that this person points out, the ease of SD12T to configure and modify the EQ and dynamics profiles for each character in the production. “Even for the substitutes, which is usually not the easiest, a copy of a profile can be made and then edited to perfectly fit any actor, even at short notice”.

Added to this is the flexibility of your workflow: “It has a lot of useful tools and I am using them all in Shiners, that combines dialogues, music and comedy. It is a very varied program and the console handles it easily. As soon as another program joins the space, we can exchange profiles and snapshots between them quickly”, points out.

How do you explain Nathan Tomberlin, project account executive at S&L Integrated, “it was going to be a sizable theater in downtown Nashville, used for shows and more. We wanted to make sure everything was easy to manage so any show or touring artist would feel comfortable coming in and performing without needing to bring in external lights and sound for gigs., and that is why we chose a platform with which the sector was already familiar, like DiGiCo SD12T”.

The compact format of this console takes up little space in the theater, without sacrificing seats or operator functionality. Besides, since the room's public address and wireless microphone systems use a red Dante, SD12T interfaces with them through a Appsys ProAudio Flexiverter, chosen by Tomberlin as a format conversion interface between those platforms and the Madi table.