Live Music Event Production At Its Best
Summer is the busiest season for the Wired Production Group team. The hectic schedule starts mid-May and runs through the end of October. Between music festivals, college and university events and other summer production adventures across the United States, our event production calendar is full — but we always make room for one special event: America’s River Festival in the great city of Dubuque, Iowa.
The annual live music festival is filled with national rock and country music acts at the Port of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa. The festival brings more than 8,000 people every year for a “Party in the Port” with camping options and two days full of cold drinks, food trucks and live music.
Travel Dubuque is the mastermind behind America’s River Festival. The multi-day music festival was launched in 2005, and our live event production team has been fortunate enough to collaborate with Travel Dubuque on this event for many years. The event planning start months in advance and our Wired Production Group staff is there to assist with all logistics for the live music. From the roofing and staging design initial plans to the content that appears on the LED screens to the nitty-gritty of the lighting design and audio production for each performer, our event professionals take every piece of our client’s vision into consideration.
In 2018 we broke out our 45’ by 45’ Thomas load-bearing roof along with two of our 9’ x 6’ LED video walls (or — as some concertgoers call them — “jumbotrons”) and our 7’ x 12’ mobile LED screen for the concert production setup. This was in addition to all the audio, lighting and video equipment for seven different music performers on the main stage. Oh, yeah, and our staff was there to rig and run it all!
Here’s one of the crazy parts about live events: they’re LIVE. That means you just never know what can happen.
On Saturday night, Dubuque was threatened with severe weather. As the final performers hit the stage, the crowd could see the thunderstorm clouds rolling in. The music show was cut short, and the crowd was sent home before the weather got too risky. (For outdoor live events, it’s important that you do not risk the safety of the crowd. Make sure you work with the venue to determine where the storm shelters are just in case your live event is crashed by a thunderstorm, flooding, tornado or some other natural disaster!)
Traffic was crazy getting out of the parking lots as people tried to rush home, but it was even crazier to watch our event production team moving as fast as they could to tear down all of the audio and video equipment and “load out” the equipment safely into the trailers.
We love having our home base in Iowa — despite our crazy weather. Any time we do a live event, the weather always keeps us on our toes because our event production crew operates rain or shine, 24/7/365. For now, we will hope for a warm and wonderful weekend at America’s River Festival next year. Cheers to #ARF2019.
To check out all the juicy details of what we’ve been up to, subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll send you the behind the scenes details of recent events, info on cool new event technology, and event management tips and tricks twice per month.