This spring's New Music Awards Tour, consisted of four bands per night playing 13 venues over 18 nights. The headline act were the London-based quartet Boy Kill Boy; described by NME recently as "like The Smiths splitting half a disco biscuit with Hard-Fi in the Hacienda gents". Amidst the frenzy on stage for much of this new band tour was monitor engineer Stan Saunders, sporting not only a new haircut but the equally new Yamaha M7CL mixing console.
"I first saw the M7CL when I visited Mags (Magaly Couturier) doing monitors on the recent Gary Numan tour. She was very happy with it and I felt it was about time I got my head around digital mixers. My spec sheet normally has NO digital in big letters but with times moving so fast, I knew we might get left behind."
Stageaudio Services, based in Stourbridge, provided the sound system for most of the tour venues except those with in-house facilities. At FOH, a Midas XL3 was accompanied by the usual van-load of outboard and graphics. With all bands sharing the same FOH desk, careful digital camera work was employed to record the mic pre and EQ settings. In contrast, the M7CL provided an all in one solution that sat comfortably in a typically diminutive stage left. We asked Stan how was coping on his foray into the mysterious world of digital audio.
"I had a few minutes run through at LMC in Birmingham who provided the M7CL, went back to the warehouse and took just 30 minutes to set it up for the tour. It was a case of click bang, job done. We had a guest monitor engineer at one of the shows and he was up and running in just 10 minutes. There's a couple of things I'd like to see changed and I'm hoping the guys in Japan will include them in the future but on the whole, I've found the desk very straight forward to use. Being able to store each band's mix on a show like this has proved very useful with so little time to swap over in the middle."
(Lee Baldock)
