Case Study: Club AE: Pittsburgh
Apr 12, 2011 12:00 PM
Stage AE, a joint venture between the Pittsburgh Steelers and PromoWest Productions, is built on Pittsburgh’s North Shore. It was built from the ground up as the city’s largest music club venue and opened on Dec. 3, 2010. The indoor/outdoor concert facility includes Club AE, an indoor music venue.
Stage AE is the second indoor/outdoor venue to be built in the U.S. by PromoWest Productions of Columbus, Ohio. Stage AE, located adjacent to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Heinz Field stadium on North Shore Drive, has a capacity of 5,500 for outdoor amphitheater shows and 2,400 for indoor events. Club AE will feature smaller national touring acts, according to Stage AE production manager Tim Peffer.
The mic complement for Club AE includes four Audio-Technica AE 4100 cardioid dynamic vocal microphones, seven ATM650 hypercardioid dynamic instrument microphones, three ATM450 cardioid condenser instrument microphones, four ATM350 cardioid condenser clip-on microphones, one ATM250 hypercardioid dynamic instrument microphone, and an ATM250DE dual-element instrument microphone. “Audio-Technica mics are our go-to mics at Club AE, and it will be nice to have them available to do double-duty on Stage AE,” Peffer says.
A monitor engineer for Vertical Horizon for eight years and for Richard Marx for six years, Peffer, who has also worked with Queen Latifah, has been using Audio-Technica microphones for the past five years. “I was turned onto them by a friend of mine, Eddie Mapp, who is Stone Temple Pilots’ front-of-house engineer. We did a run with Evanescence together in Europe a while back. Eddie had a lot of AT mics and I had some use of them. I really liked them, so I hooked up with [Audio-Technica Marketing Director] Gary Boss, he sent me out some microphones to try, and I’ve been in love with them ever since,” he says.
Stage AE opened at the beginning of December with two shows by Girl Talk, otherwise known as Pittsburgh sound collage artist Gregg Gillis. The venue has also hosted shows by Cake and Anberlin, George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars, local rapper Wiz Khalifa, and The Clarks. It is expected that the venue will promote as many as 150 shows in the coming year, in addition to private events.
