TT+ AUDIO GTX PA Employed at Rock the Boat Summer Concert

	Deanna Carter performs at the annual Rock the Boat concert series held at Boxcar Park in Everett, Washington, on Saturday, July 20, 2024. The series employed TT+ AUDIO's GTX PA system.

TT+ AUDIO's GTX PA system took center stage on July 19-20 at the annual Rock the Boat concert series held at Boxcar Park in Everett, Washington. The Everett Music Initiative and Cruzin' to Colby presented two Rock the Boat concerts, with night one (Friday, July 19) featuring alternative/grunge rock bands Mudhoney, Sweet Water, Van Eps, and Cloud Cover, and night two (Saturday, July 20) featuring country artists Clay Walker, Deana Carter, and Smith & Tegio.

Once again, event production company Audio Engineers Northwest LLC, under the direction of president Sean Walker, handled all the production elements, including working closely with RCF's TT+ engineering team for the employment of the new GTX PA at this year's Rock the Boat event. At last year's event, Walker used his RCF HDL 26-A rig, but after hearing a recent demo of the new GTX system at NAMM in January, he says the Rock the Boat event would be a perfect opportunity to put the GTX system through its paces.

"Last year we did this event with our HDL 26-A system, and it worked great, but this year we did it with the GTX 12 system, and it was even better," states Walker. "The GTX 12" box delivers some of the best sound quality I've experienced in a while. Once the system was set up and tuned, it was one of the best-sounding PAs I've ever mixed on in my life. If I had to draw a comparison to other systems in the market, I would say the GTX has the top-end and the clarity that I love about Panther and the extension and guts that I love about K2. It marries those two together in a fashion that I think is a perfect storm for a PA."

The system consisted of nine per side GTX 12 three-way line array modules and 18 GTS 29 high performance subwoofers (16 on day two), six HDL 26-As for front fill (two on day two), 4 RCF NX 12-SMA 12" active coaxial stage/floor monitor and an RCF HDL 38-AS active flyable subwoofer module.

"The first night, the system used 18 GTS 29 subs, which makes sense because of the content and genre of music those groups were playing," states Walker. "On the second night, which was in the country style with artists like Clay Walker and Deana Carter, we only used 16 subs. They were ground-stacked and evenly spaced across the front in a gradient cardioid configuration. We removed two of the subs purely for sight-line reasons. If you sat in the front row, which is prime real estate, removing them gave you a much clearer line-of-site. It wasn't anything due to PA performance; it was just based musical content and visuals. And it worked perfectly!"

Matt Ratza was the festival FOH/A1 and mixed several of the artists over the course of two days. A touring front-of-house engineer for the past 30 years, Ratza has recently been on tour with American rapper and singer Tech N9ne. When not on tour with Tech N9ne, he does quite a bit of work for Sean Walker's Audio Engineers Northwest - hence his position as festival FOH/A1. "I was the front-of-house mix engineer for the Rock the Boat summer concerts, and I hosted the other FOH engineers, and they seemed to really enjoy the PA," stated Ratza. "I personally got a chance to mix on it with Cloud Cover and with Smith & Tegio, and I really dug into the PA on their set and had fun with it. Smith & Tegio is an all-acoustic band with an upright bass, so it's a totally different set of parameters than a rock band. I found the GTX PA to be really transparent. Working with an upright bass especially can be kind of cumbersome in a live setting with a PA that large, but it did great. Everything was nice and clear. I felt the top boxes went down really low, so we didn't have to lean into subwoofers for low-end coverage. At some point, I'd love to use this rig to mix Tech N9ne, whom I'm out with regularly, because I think I'd have a lot of fun."

Ratza continues, "Prior to mixing on it, Sean Walker told me, 'Oh dude, you're going to love mixing on this PA,' and he was right -- I really dug it. It was a cool system; the clarity was there, the impact was there, and I can't say the word 'transparent' enough. If you use this rig, you can truly hear your mix. It's not colored. It made a really good impression on me."