FOH engineer Chris Pyne and monitor man Rod Matheson are both long-term DiGiCo D5 users. This time, however, Chris swapped his D5 for a new SD7.
"I was one of the first engineers to see the SD7 and was invited into DiGiCo's 'perspex box' to operate the console at PLASA last year," says Pyne. "Then James [Gordon, DiGiCo's MD] asked me if I wanted to use the SD7 on the dates we did with Kylie earlier this year. Of course I said yes.
"We had one of the very first SD7s, which we took to production rehearsals and helped to make a few improvements to the system - DiGiCo is proactive in getting real world input from engineers."
The complexity of the show meant that Pyne had 65 inputs at FOH and had to make many changes between each song - a suitable scenario for the SD7's Snapshot feature, which is more in-depth than that on the D5.
"Every single song is different - it has a different bass drum, snare drum, this that and the other," he says. "I couldn't do the show without the programming and the console's Snapshot feature, because I have to go through every single song and programme different EQ, different auxes, different gain structures, etc. It has made my life a lot easier."
The tour used a large Meyer Sound Milo / Mica system with Martin Audio W8LM in/front-fills. With audio fed via AES/EBU, the complete system was in the digital domain.
Outboard was minimal, but included XTA D2 processors on the lead vocal channels, with each of Minogue's three Sennheiser 5200 vocal microphones having its own channel on the SD7 plus a D2 across each one.
Meanwhile, at the monitor position and integrating seamlessly with the SD7, Rod Matheson's DiGiCo D5 Live dealt with a complex onstage setup.
(Jim Evans)
