I have been with Holiday On Ice since 2014, starting as a Sound Technician in my first tour, working my way up to Lead Engineer and being solely responsible for the project editing, programming, mixing and also the physical build and implementation of creative ideas for show purposes (and sync to LX and VX).
As far as the show goes, we normally play arena sized venues (2000 – 16000 capacity) around Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. The system is LAcoustics, running 50 boxes of Point Source Arc clusters in a 270 configuration over a stage that is 40m long and 20m wide. The positioning, time alignment and tuning of the system is always critical for us and can sometimes be quite challenging in all areas of set up.
One of my favourite and most effective sound design ideas to go into this tour is the direction of the surround speakers. While they were previously designed to shoot across the tribunes to create a wide yet subtle stereo field, I changed to shoot them into the (often tin) roof. This created a very nice effect for the many atmospheric sounds we had in the show and transitions. One example of its use was for the sound of birds chirping. As a previous track faded out from the main L/R mix of the PA, I sent the ambience track to the surrounds, so that as the music faded from the direct mix, the birds faded into a more reflective indirect sound before disappearing completely.