Handling tour production is Eighth Day Sound, who supplied the D5 consoles at FOH and monitors, along with d&b J- and Q-Series line arrays and subs, and Dolby Lake drives.
"I went online and got their standalone software and programmed my own console before I even sat in front of it," Colby raves. "I immediately fell in love with the structure of the console. I just got along with it right off the bat and thought it sounded very good. The layout worked very well for me, as well. I enjoy their technology and forward-thinking creations with especially the touch screen idea, being able to set the console up differently if you're a monitor or FOH guy, is so versatile. I've used all the other different desks and they're all very good, but this to me was the one. It's just a very good tool to work with for live sound engineers and I'm looking forward again to the stability that I'm used to with DiGiCo."
Colby's first experience with the D5 was on tour with Latin singer Luis Miguel, where they had three systems in use, one at FOH and two for monitors-and later on the 2005 Juanes 'Mi Sangre' tour. On the current Juanes tour, Colby's FOH rig handles 56 mic inputs from stage, with an additional four audience mics and various I/Os for playback. Engineer Anselmo Rota has another console managing monitors. As far as plug-ins, Colby has had no reason to look beyond the onboard effects at this stage in the game. "The console standalone is just wonderful. The only thing I'm doing different on this tour that I haven't done before is I'll be using the D-Tube technology for slightly warmer vocal sounds and electric guitars. I'm using their plate reverbs on drums, hall on vocals, delay on vocal, chorus a bit on horns and maybe on some acoustic guitars. The rooms are already so difficult that the more effects you put on top of what you're trying to do sometimes gets in the way. So I'm a relatively clean, pure-path type of a mixer more than I am an effects wizard."
(Jim Evans)
