In May, Noisy Oyster decided to replace the sound systems in their walkabout characters “The Meanderthals” with Minirigs. We had been using a cobbled together system with T class amps and Infinity car speakers. Our sound sources were coming from 2 iPods and also a headword microphone going through a vocal transformer effects box which meant that we also had to use 12v 4 channel mixers as well. It worked quite well and we used this system for 3 years but it was unnecessarily complicated and the sound never had the depth and quality that we were after.
Replacing the system with Minirigs was an instant improvement and we were able to dispense with the mixers as we could use each Minirig as an individual system, but it did also present us with a few challenges i.e.: how to mount them in our characters. We solved this by 3d printing holders with fixing points, which was great for the noises coming from the big men but we still needed to mount one high up for our voices to come from the smaller puppets at the top of the boxes. Our first solution to this was to cable tie the Minirigs onto Kayak helmets, it seemed to work well in trial, though we did look a bit ridiculous. The first outing for our newly improved Meanderthals was to Lach festival, a street festival in Belgium. To our discomfort we found that we hadn't calculated for the extra height and we had to walk the whole time with our heads bent forwards to compensate.
Back in the workshop, the 3d printed holders were used again to fix the Minirigs onto poles just above our heads, a much better solution and we didn't look so silly.
The big outing for the Meanderthals this year was to Sziget Festival in Budapest. We sweated in our puppets for 5 days in the 33 degree heat. The Minirigs performed flawlessly and the Meanderthals were a huge success!