Headed up by Giles Bristow, Alstublieft was employed by festival organisers The Barfly Group to look after audio production across the entire festival, which this year featured around 150 bands playing across 20 venues. Featured acts included The Happy Mondays, Captain and The Magic Numbers.
A DiGiCo a D1 Live 48MDR, featuring a local Minirack and eight analogue I/O and eight AES I/O at FOH, and a stage rack with 48 in and out, was used for shows at the Corn Exchange and The Brighton Centre, East Wing. "Initially Giles was a little hesitant about using a digital desk in a festival situation," says DiGiCo's technical sales manager, Tim Shaxson, who was on site throughout. "We prepped the desk with a generic template that could be altered to suit each venue, act and engineer. The console was used by 15 acts over the course of three days and all the guys who walked up to the desk were instantly at home with it, dispelling any concerns that Giles may have had."
This method of working enabled fast changeovers between bands, as well as shorter time between sound checks, as each engineer was able to save all of his settings and desk layout, which could then be instantly recalled as needed. Alstublieft's FOH/system engineer Reay Grant slipped behind the D1 with ease: "He was over the moon with the desk and said that of all the digital consoles he had used, the DiGiCo was by far the easiest and most logical," says Shaxson.
Alstublieft provided an external effects rack, but many of the engineers were more than happy to use all of the features integrated into the D1 including EQ, reverb, delay and dynamics.
"Although none of the engineers had any training on the desk before hand (we did offer it to all of them in advance), they all were able to get straight into it during sound check. It all went really well," Shaxson explains.
(Jim Evans)
