Production used two Soundcraft Vi6 consoles, run in 96-channel V3.0 mode, which Jaquiss filled with around 80 inputs, 56 of which were stage alone, including guest vocals and assorted media. "The Vi6 is a brilliant desk, great sounding and with a very small footprint for this style of tour," he comments. The existing console was upgraded to 96 channels via an additional DSP card, while the sound engineer immediately identified the advantages of the latest software release.
"With both desks upgraded to V3 software, along with the increase in channels, the snapshot and scoping functions had been improved as well. This has now made it a totally usable function of the console in combination with the improvements to the isolation features. The ability to export names as an Excel file is useful when typing up long channel names in the offline editor."
Walter Jaquiss discovered the full potential of the Vi6 at the recent twinned two-day Give It A Name (GIAN) Festival, held simultaneously at Brixton Academy and Manchester Academy, and then flipped overnight.
"There were seven bands a day at each venue and we were just able to email the show files overnight between myself and Steve Pattison in Manchester. The show mixes came up exactly as they had been created the night before - we had the files loaded into the desks before the band's engineers walked in the next day."
"In fact, I was able to program all the bands' files in the back of the car on the way down to the Brixton É and I could do the same with John Barrowman."
(Jim Evans)
