With both shows - one for friends and family, the other for 300 competition-winners - taking place at the Westbourne Park venue on the same day, monitor engineer Dave Guerin, Front of House man Matt Butcher and PA tech James 'Kedge' Kerridge had a very busy time. But with Dave and Matt each mixing on a DiGiCo SD10, supplied by rental company Entec Sound and Light, what could have been a very challenging event ran very smoothly.
"When we tour, there's a balancing act between what we need and the available budget," says Dave. "We decided on the SD10 for these shows because it's a big enough console to do what we need, it's physically small enough to fit in venues like this, it sounds really good - especially at 96kHz - and the rental cost isn't too high.
"DiGiCo desks are great, I've been using them since the D5 V3 and we both like them. They're user friendly and it all just works."
Matt agrees, adding, "I love them. The control surface is fantastic, the SD-Rack sounds great, the mic preamps sound fantastic and, with everything at 96kHz, there's so much detail in the sound.
"I love the symmetry of the SD10's central section, and having the right and left hand sections means you can have something going on in one of the bays, leave it while you go and do something else on another bay, then come back to the first bay and it's still there."
For the shows at Mode, both engineers shared an SD-Rack, with its 56 inputs all in use. Dave controlled the gain levels, with Matt trimming them as required.
"Dave was attenuating his outputs because his wedges are so efficient," says Matt. "So we ran the gains nice and hot, using all the bits on the input and it worked really well. It kept our footprint very small."
For the recording, Matt had a laptop running Steinberg Nuendo connected to the SD10's MADI outputs, running at 96kHz. Meanwhile, an RME MADIface routed 48kHz audio direct from the DiGiRack to a second laptop running Apple Logic as a backup.
"Overall, the entire system was simple to set up and it all worked perfectly," he says. "The fact that the SD10 is an easy desk to use also meant we had more time in a challenging room like Mode to concentrate on distributing the PA to achieve the best sound.
"The stage sound was very clean, thanks to Dave and his SD10, which also made life easier for me. The shows were a complete success for the band and the DiGiCo system played a vital role in that."
(Jim Evans)
