by Mark Truman, Tree Director

The stage is 4 feet off the ground and is 80 feet across

The tree is 35 feet tall, 60 feet across at the base. It weighs 1900 pounds.

There are ten rows in the tree, it can hold up to 80 singers.

All choir members must be 6 feet tall. If they are not, then they have their height "adjusted"

The tree has 400 chase lights on the rail tops, 1500 miniature white lights.

There are 5 lighting bays above and behind you. They put out 45,000 watts of light on the tree. A single light consol and operator control them.

There are two follow spot operators 50 feet above the audience.

There is one operator just for the tree lights. Light crew is a 4-man crew.

Special effects we can use are snow, fog, black light, wind, strobes, and of course our disco ball above you.

We use up to 34 channels of sound for the tree performance. These are divided between microphones, wireless, playback, monitor, and enhancement. A two-man crew runs sound.

There is a two-person crew backstage.

All crewmembers are connected with wireless headsets.

We are using 11 wired mics and 7 wireless mics. We use up to 1800 feet of microphone cable.

Rehearsals start in September, Planning starts in August. Music is chosen in March.

While lighting is important, it is the choir that is the "tree". To insure that you get the best the choir has to give, our sound system is quite extensive. While none of it would work in your home, we can make some serious noise.
While much of this won't make sense to most of you, we offer the following for you audiophiles out there,
The 3 QSC amplifiers can put out a whopping 1990 watts at 8 ohms.
The house system is a tri amp mono system using ac 23 active crossover.
There is an electro voice s181 18 inch subwoofer powered by one channel of the QSC cx702
The EV dl-15x 15-inch low frequency driver is powered by 1 channel of the QSC cx702 amplifier
The Altec high frequency horn with Emilar driver is powered by 1 channel of the QSC 3500- amp.
There are two monitor feeds consisting of 1 channel of the QSC 3500, and 3 channels of the QSC 1400
Signal processing consists of Rane 1/3 octave 31 band graphic equalizer, a Rane me30 1 octave 2-15 band graphic equalizer, and an Aphex Aural Exciter.
The sound mixing consol is a Yamaha pm-1200 32-channel mixer.
The whole system is ac voltage protected by a furman ps-8 power sequencer.
Now that's all nice and well but what we get asked the most is, "How many mics do you use?
Each year has different requirements for wireless and stage mics. In the past we have used as many as 8 wireless, 8 solo mics in the "tree", 6 choir "tree" mics, 6 stage mics, and 4 solo stage mics. For a couple of years we had to mike the 24-piece orchestra using 12 mics.
For this years "tree", we are using 6 choir "tree" mics, 2 solo mics in the "tree", 4 solo stage mics, and 4 wireless mics.
For most of the "living tree" set-ups, we use between 1,200 and 1,800 feet of microphone cable.