RCF powers the 25th anniversary of Niccolò Fabi's career at the Verona Arena

Niccolò Fabi celebrates his 25 year career with over 10,000 spectators at the ancient Roman amphitheater Arena di Verona. A hugely successful evening, divided into two parts. A first acoustic segment, with guitar, piano and voice, and the second with a band and an orchestra of 40 instruments on stage. The entire sound system is RCF-branded, with a special guest: the all-new GTX 12 line array.

Niccolò Fabi is considered one of the most important Italian artists known today. Singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, the Arena concert anticipates "meno per meno", his latest album, recently released. The show at the wonderful Roman amphitheater in Verona retraces the roots of the singer-songwriter's artistic journey. The first part of the concert focuses on the most intimate and acoustic sphere of Niccolò Fabi, all alone, center stage, with his guitar and piano. The second part of the concert introduces an orchestra of 40 elements on stage directed by Enrico Melozzi as well as trusted collaborators such as Filippo Cornaglia on drums and Roberto Angelini on guitars.

Riccardo Parravvicini manages the sound at the FOH position. Riccardo explains some of the technically salient points of the show. "The first part was managed totally live, without backing tracks. We worked together with Niccolò by choosing all the effects for the guitar and voice combined with a series of effects that were managed from my mixing position (delay, harmonizer, reverbs etc...). Half way through the concert, without interruption, on Niccolò's last chord, I start a pre-recorded sound of about 2 minutes, which allows the musicians to sit on stage for the opening of the second part of the concert. Niccolò needs to listen to my sound effects in headphones for his first solo so that he can play along with the FX. To achieve this, I sent two stems (one with the instrument and one with the voice) to the stage engineer (Simone Bonetto) with all the effects. In the second part of the concert, we added the orchestra, drums, percussion, and guitars as well as some channels of backing tracks, the click, and the LTC for light sync.
The pre-mix of the orchestra is managed by Davide Dell 'Amore (a sound engineer who works with Enrico Melozzi and the Clandestine Night Orchestra). The audio setup is based on a redundant Optocore loop connected to a DiGiCo SD5 on stage, two DiGiCo SD Rack 56-32, and the DiGiCo SD12 at FOH for the orchestra. In addition to all this, Parravvicini controls the audio feed from his Waves LV1 mixer.

On stage, Bonetto used a P16 system to send a series of premixes for listening to orchestras as well as a series of IEM monitors with mixes dedicated to listening to the artist, musicians, backliners, etc. Another station with two systems that record all channels (main and backup), also connected to the stage console. All the technologies have been provided by IMPUT SERVICE.
Emanuele Morlini (Sound System Designer, RCF) followed the entire project of the RCF system for the Verona Arena, also set up for the 7 concerts of Ligabue in the same space. "After great success of the new GTX system at RCF Arena and the Olympic Stadium in Rome, we brought the system here to the Verona Arena, to analyze its strengths but also its weaknesses, as the system is still in the testing phase and is not yet commercially available,” says Morlini. “It won't be released until we're 100% sure of the performance. We are very happy that Ligabue trusted the system last summer and wanted it again here, in Verona, and even happier that Niccolo Fabi also agreed to use GTX to celebrate his 25 years of career," comments Morlini.

The sound system consists of 18 GTX modules per side as well as two side 12 modules, all amplified with the new RCF XPS 16KD amplifiers. All subwoofers, double 21" TTS 56-A, are on the ground, with 10 HDL 26-A serving the first rows as front fill. All speakers are connected via RDNet for control and optimization and to the Dante network via four DX 1616 processors for audio.
Parravvicini concludes, "The audience was enthusiastic, the artist was very happy and the show was very enjoyable, so I can tell you that I am very pleased with the result and had a geat time.. The PA is a great discovery, it responded perfectly and translates my pre-mix made during rehearsals without corrections. Excellent balance, especially in the high frequencies. I found a great uniformity of listening within the entire area, a sign that the audio project was executed well, but also that the GTX sounds amazing. My sincere congratulations to Emanuele Morlini who supported me, he is an excellent system engineer, as well as the RCF team!"