Gatehouse of Fleet Festival Group aim to make this year’s Midsummer Music as green and sustainable as they can.
And to do that, they’ll be using a pedal-powered sound system for their outdoor concert on Saturday, June 24.
The evening concert on the Roger Hampshire Stage in the Ship Inn’s riverside garden features Hunter and McMustard with support from Rudebeard. John McMustard is the lead singer of festival favourites, Colonel Mustard and the Dijon Five.
But the other stars of the show will be the people who keep right on pedalling, just as eager youngsters and older folk did last year when the contraption made its Gatehouse debut at Midsummer Music.
Festival group chairperson, Michelle McClure, said: “Power pedalling is great fun and the sound quality is excellent.”
The ingenious device is the brainchild of Dalry based Tinker Bruce, as he likes to be known. Bruce does not have a brand name for the gadgetry that fires up the generator; he refers to it as a human powered energy system.
He said: “Energy is all around us but we can’t see or feel it. The joyful thing about this system is that we can use our bodies to feel the energy and turn it into sound.”
Bruce, who has a degree in electronics, has been inventing pedal-powered mechanisms since early this century. He does it mainly for fun but there is serious science behind his contraptions.
Much of the hardware he uses has been adapted and recycled, such as old electric bike wheels, but there are also new components.
Musicians plugging into the sound system need not worry about their amplifiers overloading as there is an inverter which lowers the power of the electric current to the required 12 volts.
There are back-up batteries to provide continuity when pedal-pushers pause or change over.
Bruce’s human powered energy source can adapt to many different uses, such as the pedal-powered smoothie maker he created for a Wheels of Fleet event. Another incarnation is the Vibratron, a vibrating massage chair which also plays music, and one of his early commissions was for a pedal-driven photocopier.
Michelle added: “We are looking forward to Bruce bringing his sound system to our festival and I am sure it will once again prove a big attraction and lots of fun.
Midsummer Music runs in Gatehouse of Fleet from June 23 to 25. For the full program and session details, visit www.midsummermusicfestival.co.uk
