Ronnie Scott’s, London’s famous Soho jazz club, has turned to Shure to deliver the audio backbone of ‘Upstairs at Ronnie’s’, its newly redeveloped live music room. The venue, which sits above the club’s famous downstairs stage, has been built from the ground up with a single ambition: to create the greatest small live music venue in the world.
Designed to seat 140 guests, Upstairs at Ronnie’s combines technical specification with intimacy, pairing a Yamaha S3X Grand Piano and d&b sound system with a fully digital Shure microphone and monitoring signal chain built around SLX-D+ and Axient Digital PSM.
The club set out to create a purpose-built room that complements its main stage while offering a different experience, one where every design decision, from acoustics and sightlines to equipment selection, is focused on sound quality, comfort and connection.
“With Upstairs at Ronnie’s, we set ourselves the somewhat audacious goal of creating the greatest small live music venue in the world,” says Charlie Dale, Technical Manager at Ronnie Scott’s. “We wanted a space where artists and audiences could feel even closer to the music, with every element of the design focused on sound quality, comfort and connection.”
The redevelopment gives the club the platform to support a far broader range of performances than would traditionally be associated with a small jazz club. Monday nights host a classical series presented by violinist Lizzie Ball and the club’s Artistic Director and House Pianist James Pearson; Wednesdays focus on jazz vocal performances followed by a vocal jam night for emerging and established singers alike; and the venue’s long-running Friday night Cuban music session continues a tradition stretching back well over a decade.
Audio quality was central to the brief from the outset. Ronnie Scott’s has a reputation as a great-sounding venue, and that standard needed to extend seamlessly into the new room – whether reinforcing the most intimate performances or supporting the club’s Monday Classical series, where every nuance of the performance needed to be faithfully reproduced.
Reliability was equally critical. The club is open 362 days a year, often staging between two and four shows daily, placing significant demands on every piece of equipment in the building.
Upstairs at Ronnie’s deploys Shure SLX-D+ for microphones and Axient Digital PSM for in-ear monitoring, giving the venue a fully digital signal chain from mic to monitor. Upstairs at Ronnie’s runs four channels of Axient Digital PSM, with the system also allowing the team to monitor RF quality and settings directly from the console over the venue’s Dante network.
The venue’s Axient Digital PSM system also benefits from Shure’s recent firmware update introducing Single Carrier (SC) Narrowband, a new digital transmission mode designed to give engineers a more familiar and dependable RF setup without the need for complex coordination or advanced antenna configurations, well suited to a fast-paced room running multiple shows a day.