Getting In On The Act

QSC, Allen & Heath, Audio-Technica, and Blackmagic Design

Newcastle’s Clint Topic and Bailey Watts have created something very special in ‘The Act’; a series of intimate concerts presented in the round for a crowd of around 400, all filmed by a full crew. Clint’s business Sawtooth Studios brings the audio and live production skills, and Bailey’s Bones Collective the video production expertise.

As of the writing of this piece, The Act Newcastle had presented four shows, with two more scheduled before this magazine goes to press. All of them have been presented at Newcastle’s Earp Distilling Co., with a little sponsorship and gear help from Technical Audio Group, distributor of QSC, Allen & Heath, and Audio-Technica, and Blackmagic Design, the ubiquitous Australian video gear manufacturer.

The first ‘Act’ ran back in October 2024, with Alex The Astronaut, Hein Cooper, Didirri, Ben Morgan and Miller Roberts. The second was Ball Park Music’s ‘Like Love’ exclusive album launch show in April 2025, where they played the album for the first time. The third saw Bliss N Eso perform their new album ‘The Moon (The Dark Side)’ with special guest Ivan Ooze in September 2025.

The fourth Act showcased Blue Mountains EDM duo Hermitude launching ‘Eight’, their eighth studio album, with support from Marniezworld on April 19 this year. In the next two weeks, The Act will host Vacations ‘Holy Grail’ Tour and Kate Miller-Heidke’s ‘The Kiss And The Abyss’ exclusive album preview show.

CX talked to The Act’s Clint Topic in the wake of the Hermitude show, following up with Hermitude’s FoH engineer Drew Bisset.

“Bailey and I had an idea to run intimate shows where people can be close to their favourite artists, while also being special occasions like album launches, which we film,” explains Clint. “Our first show was a line-up of soloists, then Ball Park Music’s show was their new album played start to finish, as was the case with Hermitude.”

Filming the shows so they have a life online after the event was part of The Act’s DNA from the start. “We had nine cameras on Hermitude,” continues Clint. “All of our shows have had eight to 10 cameras, thanks to support from Blackmagic Design.”

While The Act are documenting every moment, they’ve made a cultural decision that their audience won’t be. “It’s a ‘no camera phones’ situation,” stipulates Clint. “We just want people to come and be present. We put stickers over people’s camera phone lenses. I went to a couple of venues in Europe where they were doing it, and I absolutely loved it. We’ve had such a positive response, and it’s something we’ve been praised for.”

Drew Bisset became aware of The Act through Hermitude’s manager, a Newcastle native. “We were putting together a Hermitude tour on the back of the release of ‘Eight’, relates Drew. “The Act were really keen to get Hermitude on their series, and it was a great opportunity to give this a go on the first show of the tour.

The date was two weeks before the rest of the tour, and we’d get filmed content to promote it. The in-the-round format really suited us because the show is an EDM-focused Boiler Room style.”

With support from TAG, the PA at The Act Newcastle has consisted of QSC L Class line array elements and subwoofers, with fill from QSC KC12 column speakers, all driven from Allen & Heath digital mixing desks. The camera crew use Audio-Technica wireless IEMs to get their programme feed and director’s instructions.

With the shows in the round, The Act had been positioning a PA stack at each corner of the stage, radiating outwards, with the subs under the stage, aimed in the same direction as the mid-highs. Looking at the documentation before they got to the gig, Drew Bisset had some ideas about how to optimise the set-up: “My initial thoughts were that the mid-highs were all covered well,” says Drew. “It was the low end I was really focused on. I needed to make sure that it was tight. Hermitude’s music is quite bass heavy, with lots of articulation in the basslines. Balanced coverage of the low frequency spectrum around the room is really important. I knew that four spread-out subwoofer positions about five metres apart from each other was going to be problematic. I knew there would be hot spots at some frequencies and complete cancellations at others. That wasn’t going to work for us.”

Drew went into problem-solving mode and visited the QSC website; “QSC have downloadable .gll files, which are generic loudspeaker modelling files that you can import into modelling software EASE Focus.” Taking his inspiration from Metallica, who do a lot of shows in the round, Drew came up with a “four-leafed clover” design that had the subs abutting each other at 90 degrees under the stage. “That got each driver to within a metre of each other, so that we’re within a quarter of the wavelength of the highest frequency that the subs would reproduce. I modelled that in EASE Focus, and also modelled the existing set-up. It showed that it would even out the coverage and get an extra 6 to 8dB of SPL without increasing the level going into it.”

With that documentation in hand, Drew could argue for the stage to be raised to implement the design, something that Clint and The Act readily agreed to because of the modelling!

“Drew’s new sub design centred under the stage made a huge difference,” admits Clint. “It’s been historically tricky to get a good sound in the venue as, admittedly, it’s just a big shed. The venue has been doing a lot of sound treatment, and that’s helped. The L Class really sounds great. I love just how easy they are to deploy for a line array system; the fact you can just clip them up and they calculate their own dispersion angle really helps in that space.”

In addition to the L Class, QSC’s KC12 column speakers are deployed as front fill. “There’s just a couple of spots when you’re right up the front that are dead,” observes Clint. “We’re just using the KC12’s top boxes. They’re also really good in terms line-of-sight for the cameras. I was quite surprised at how good they sound in conjunction with the L Class.”

At the mix position, The Act have been working their way through the majority of Allen & Heath’s digital desk range. “We started off with my SQ-6,” recalls Clint. “For the second show, we had an Avantis that we got from TAG for front of house and my SQ-6 running monitors, which was all IEMs for Ballpark Music.

The last two shows, Bliss & Esso and Hermitude were both on dLives.” “I’m touring dLive with Hermitude, so that aligned nicely with the TAG sponsorship,” adds Drew. “We do some cool things with the setup. Hermitude are an electronic duo, Luke Dubber (a.k.a. Luke Dubs) and Angus Stuart (a.k.a. Elgusto), with DJ decks and a bunch of analog synths and drum machines. All of those synths and drum machines are MIDI synced, and their audio outs come to me first for a bit of processing. I submix them down and then it goes back to their DJ mixer. They do all the filtering and cross mixing from sound to sound. They’ve got two CDJs on stage, that takes up two channels on their four-channel Pioneer A9 mixers, then they have their own ‘Dubs gear’ and ‘Elgusto’s gear’ submixes in the other two channels. Because the dLive is one of the lowest latency live consoles, I can insert live processing between the synth mixers and the DJ mixer with no latency compromise at all.”

The all-important recording is handled by taking a post-preamp/pre-everything else split from the desks via Dante. “We run that split straight out into ProTools,” confirms Clint. “We have two splits, so we always have redundant recording running on two laptops in case there’s any issues. They always sound great coming off the Allen & Heath desks; just nice and clean.”

The Act is producing high-quality intimate gigs in an area that doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to get close to major artists, while creating broadcast-quality content to boot. “All of our sponsors have been absolutely amazing,” Clint points out. “They’ve been behind us from the first day and we just couldn’t have done it without their support.”