After launching a daunting but successful quest to find 'Sam The Man' - a front man to temporarily replace the inimitable Boy George - they performed their first live gig since 2002 during this summer at London's Too2Much club, where front of house engineer Mark Portlock and monitor engineer Liam Halpin made groundbreaking use of their DiGiCo D1 Live digital mixing console.
"As production manager as well as FOH engineer, sometimes I have to make difficult decisions for the overall benefit of budget and ultimate show delivery," says Portlock. "With DiGiCo I feel that the decisions are now far less difficult."
Playing a small venue like Too2Much brought with it the normal conundrum of how to fit all the equipment Portlock and Halpin wanted to use into very limited space. The remarkable solution was to use just one console for both the front of house and monitor mixes. And it was Halpin's ingenuity that made it possible.
Halpin says: "We started out by planning to split the channels, so we had monitor channels on layers below the FOH channels, as there was no room in the club to put a separate monitor desk.
"We had no production rehearsals or prep time either, so I was programming the desk on the day of the gig while Mark and Keith Reynolds (stage manager) got everything else ready.I'd decided to hook up a laptop running the remote software for the D1 so that I could make adjustments to the monitors. But as soundcheck drew nearer, I realised running backwards and forwards to front of house was going to be a nightmare for a nine piece band, especially as time was already looking tight for soundcheck.
"So I decided to try a remote desktop control of one computer from my other laptop via a wireless connection. I had tried this before, but it hadn't been successful. I gave it a go and realised very quickly that the communication between the two computers was too slow to be any use. So I decided to abandon the Wired connection and the second laptop, and just plug the wireless unit straight into the desk. Once I'd reset the IP addresses it just worked."I got through the soundcheck mixing the monitors while actually being stood behind the artists on stage. Some of the band were quite confused about why there was this bloke wandering around the stage holding a laptop, until we explained the PC was actually the monitor desk!"
Halpin had some control groups setup as separate mute groups for monitors and FOH. To make sure these were permanently available on the control surface, and still allow Portlock his eight VCAs, Halpin programmed mute control onto the Macro buttons on the surface along with Delay Tap tempo.
"Because the band's mix consisted of 28 channels, by the time I'd doubled everything up and added effects and media, the channel count had gone over the standard 64 channels that the desk was configured for," says Halpin. "I reconfigured the desk to enable us to up the amount of processing to cope with 96 channels. That many channels on a postage stamp of a desk is quite crazy, but the D1 took it all in its stride and performed flawlessly even though I didn't see it throughout the show."
"I have never felt so in control in such a high pressure and technically absurd environment as I did behind my DiGiCo that night," adds Portlock. "I don't think there's any going back now!"
(Chris Henry)
