This was one of a pair of 48-input D-Show consoles in the venue for the NIN shows; while Prowda was multitrack recording the opening show at Brixton the experienced Jim Warren was providing the house mix - as he has since first being exposed to the Venue back in March. He was also using the desk's FireWire capability at FOH, providing a multitrack back-up in the event of HD multitrack failure at the stage.
Warren is best known for his work behind the mixing board for Radiohead, and he believes that it was as a result of seeing a Radiohead show that Trent Reznor got in touch with the award-winning engineer. "I wanted to bring a bit of the punk ethic to the mix - I try and avoid mixing them as a heavy metal band," he says. "It would be easy to simplify the sound but I have tried to keep that noisy, gritty stuff in."
After landing the gig, Jim Warren says he spent the first couple of weeks "doing rough mixes" every day, using the Venue's onboard automation to "slowly tweak things the way Trent wanted it." He adds, "Jerome [Dillon, the drummer] is very busy, using a lot of sequenced and triggered effects. In fact I did a couple of complete run-throughs just mixing drums and programming that into the desk."
The band were already familiar with Digidesign (the whole of their latest With Teeth CD was recorded using Pro Tools) and they were keen to maintain continuity. The engineer had experienced most of the other digital consoles out in the field and was eager to try another. To date, he has been very receptive to the Digidesign Venue. "Although I'm not using many of the plug-ins they are useful to enable me to EQ channels differently on a song-by-song basis, and give me options on compression and gating. Also I'm using all the onboard reverb, distortions, delays and ring modulators completely by choice - this tour was a perfect opportunity to try these out."
The desk, he says, automatically corrects for latency within the console, which he has calculated to be in the region of a couple of milliseconds. "But this is insignificant compared to the delays introduced into the system in the interest of speaker time alignment." Warren is using the full AES capability of the desk. "All the outputs are AES out to XTA speaker controllers - with Smaart to analyse the system.
"We also have a multi-band tube processor which we put across the left and right channels, something I do as a matter of course now, to prevent things being too digital and hard. We needed to squash it, and by judicious use of distortion and compression, my ambition was to make the sound appear much louder than it really was."
Having succeeded in 'garaging' the sound of the pioneering group, the next step, he says, will be to remote control the Digidesign desk.
(Lee Baldock)
