Wigwam Hire, who have carried out sound systems installations in these venues and have a long association with Celtic Connections, provided the production control for this year's major hosting venue - supplying the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall with a Digidesign D-Show Profile at front-of-house and D-Show in the monitor position.
Wigwam appointed Sean Horsman to offer support to the incoming sound engineers having their first run out with Digidesign, offering an analogue desk alternative. He says: "The L'Acoustics ARCS system rig was designed to run with the house analogue control but Chris Hill (Wigwam's hire manager) suggested we go digital - and it worked fantastically."
He said sound engineers who had never worked outside the analogue domain adapted to the topology of the two D-Show consoles intuitively. They were also able to use Wigwam's Pro Tools HD rig for recording purposes. "With D-Show Profile you don't need a lot of training," he said. "Everyone knows what a channel strip looks like, it's just a case of translating it to this board - and they were soon all over it."
Horsman typically stacked five or six FX returns and stripped the desk back to an essential palette of dynamics to avoid over-use.
"The one event that saw D-Show Profile in its element," he says, "was a live broadcast. There were 15-minute soundchecks for 10 bands with infinitely different gain structures and instrumentation - from fiddles and bouzoukis to ambient jazz.
"We were given just 30-second turn-around times in each case - so we built up individual snapshots for each band and it all went beautifully. The BBC technicians said the whole exercise was exemplary."
(Chris Henry)
