This year's festival brought Maceo Parker, Herbie Hancock, and Harry Connick, Jr., as well as The Roots, Taj Mahal, Chaka Khan, and Macy Gray to the largest city in Canada. To accommodate all of the acts at the 1,200-seat Nathan Phillip Square main stage and the demands of their engineers, FOH guru Brad Mulligan set up the new Innovason Eclipse digital console to have a predictable 'analogue' topology.
For almost all of the engineers, it was their introduction to Innovason's M.A.R.S. integrated multitrack recording system, which allowed them to record portions of the soundcheck and then tweak their mixes offline in headphones.
"The huge advantage of having a digital board for an event like the Toronto Jazz Festival is that we can save each act's mix at soundcheck and then recall it instantly for the performance," says Mulligan. "That said, it's still the case that 85% of the riders we get show a preference for an analogue board. The engineers want to focus on the music, not learning some menu-thick interface. The Innovason Eclipse is tremendously flexible, and I am able to set it up in a way that everyone agrees feels analog. In that way, we get the best of both worlds - instant recall and an intuitive interface that puts engineers at ease.
"We received a lot of great compliments," concluded Mulligan. "The sound of the Eclipse was compared to high-end analog boards that many of these engineers grew up on.
(Jim Evans)
