The festival takes place on the island of Zanzibar, with the main stage at the historic Old Fort in Stone Town. Four consecutive nights of non-stop, eight hour live performances meant that using a digital console made a lot of sense. Purchased for last year's festival, the DiGiCo SD8 and MadiRack had been stored in a container for a year, but had coped very well with the tropical climate and monsoon rains.
"After been cleaned and tested at the end of last year's festival, the console and MadiRack were kept in their flight-cases inside a large storage container, along with other PA equipment," says FoH engineer Gurjit Dhinsa.
"When we got them out for this year's festival, all the hardware was in a stable condition, the touch screen was fine and there were no issues with the MadiRack. The only issue we had was that the console's faders weren't sliding smoothly. But a chat with Robert Andrews from DiGiCo's technical support team determined it was simply down to the lack of use. Sure enough, after we ran through some diagnostic tests they stabilised and worked perfectly."
Using a console that had the facilities to handle a wide array of inputs, and quickly change over between them, meant that Gurjit and visiting sound engineers were able to keep up with the festival's relentless schedule.
"On any given day, the festival may start with a Taarab orchestra and move on to a band consisting of drums, bass, guitars, keys, various acoustic instruments and vocals. After that there may be a percussion group, then a singer/guitarist and so on," he says.
"The setups vary anywhere from eight up to 40 channels. The SD8 was the festival's only FoH board, so it had to deal with changeovers in-between all the performances while, (at the same time), the MC microphones, CD playback, local record and audio feeds for video cameras and external spaces were kept running."
(Jim Evans)
