In other countries Gyllene Tider are best known for lead singer Per Gessle being half of pop duo Roxette. In Sweden, however, they maintain massive popularity. Promoting new album Dags att tänka på refrängen (Time To Think Of The Chorus), the tour featured a DiGiCo SD10 at Front of House and an SD5 on monitors.
The consoles were supplied - along with DiGiCo SD-Racks, microphones and monitors - by rental company Soundforce Scandinavia AB. Anders Molund, the company's audio project manager, is also Gyllene Tider's FOH engineer.
"The SD5 was the first choice console for our monitor engineer Peter Fredriksson. To be honest, I used the SD10 because we are so busy at Soundforce it was the only DiGiCo console with Optocore left in the warehouse," he reports. "But I love DiGiCo mixers and, like the SD5, it's a great console. It's compact, easy to work with and had more than enough muscle for this tour.
"DiGiCo also has a great habit of bringing out exciting new features in every software update. It makes the 'older' consoles feel very up to date - for example, we have one of the first SD8s in the warehouse and we use it a lot."
The tour's stage feeds were routed to an SD-Rack configured as 56 analogue inputs with 48 analogue and eight AES outputs, with Optocore running to the SD5 and SD10, all at 48kHz. A DiGiCo MaDiRack was also linked to the SD10 to allow FOH and monitors for support act Linnea Henriksson to be mixed on it. The band used Sennheiser in-ear monitors, plus d&b wedges and shakers, while a Meyer Sound LEO system comprised the PA.
"They are not a 'channel hungry' act," says Anders. "I had around 40 inputs at FOH, plus some tie lines back and forth using the Optocore patch. Peter was doing around 10 stereo IEM mixes, a couple of wedge mixes and stereo sidefills, plus sends to the shakers. In addition, I was using a DiGiCo UB MADI USB interface to make multitrack recordings of the shows on a PC running Reaper software."
"It was incredibly successful. We had over 43,000 people in Gothenburg - that's not bad for a Swedish band that has not toured since 2004," says Anders. "The DiGiCo consoles performed faultlessly, so we had no need of the company's technical support. But it was reassuring to know how quick they would be to help - as they have been in the past - if we had needed them."
(Jim Evans)
