DiGiCo consoles on tour with Craig David
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The tour will continue into the summer with festival appearances, formatted as either full live band sets or the artist’s TS5 boutique DJ shows. To ensure seamless audio quality across the range of performances, the sound team specified consoles from DiGiCo’s portfolio.
Entitled Hold That Thought, the tour celebrates 20 years since the release of David’s critically acclaimed Born To Do It debut album, which established him as one of the UK’s best loved artists. The tour encompasses new tracks from his forthcoming album as well as his early music, and elements of his TS5 project, named after the Tower Suite 5 apartment in Miami, where he used to host house parties, recalling the early days of his career when he used to DJ, MC and sing.
Following the intense arena dates, the tour takes in festival appearances plus dedicated TS5 fly-in shows in Ibiza. With technical requirements varying from show to show, both FOH and monitor engineers designed the rider to stipulate various sized DiGiCo consoles to tailor the system for the different formats.
Peter Whitelaw, David’s FOH engineer since 2010, specifies a DiGiCo Quantum 338 for the full live band shows, and an SD12 or SD10 for any fly-in and TS5 shows. Monitor engineer, Ash Wilkinson, who has toured with David for nearly 10 years, specifies a Quantum 7 for the full live band shows, with the compact SD12 his first choice for the TS5 shows.
“Both Ash and I have been using DiGiCo consoles for many years. In fact, I first started using the brand when the D5 was launched 20 years ago,” says Whitelaw. “Given the mixture of venues and types of shows on this tour, consistency across the range gives me peace of mind; I’m happy and confident to jump from an SD11 up to a Quantum 7, depending on what budget and logistics dictate. Ash and I both agree it's great to know we can spec ‘anything SD’ and reliably load up the same show.”
“Craig is an exacting artist who requests his in-ear mix as close to studio perfect as possible. The six other musicians on stage require more traditional, largely unprocessed, monitor mixes, and the BVs are somewhere in between,” Wilkinson explains. “To achieve that, I have effectively split my desk in half, with all inputs except drums and shout mics duplicated, to allow discrete processing, with various nodal-fed and processed sub-mix auxes merging for Craig. Meanwhile, setup for the TS5 segment of the show requires extra wedges and IEM’s, plus the usual sidefills, eight tech mixes, video, LX, VT, and additional requirements for support and guest acts.”
