Guest artists on the tour include soul and R&B singer Beverly Knight and UK beatboxing champion Beardyman. With soloists, a 14-piece band and the choir, the on stage inputs soon rose to over 70. This gave monitor engineer Jamie Hickey an opportunity to put the new Yamaha DSP5D through its paces alongside a PM5D-RH, supplied by Britannia Row.
A relative newcomer to the PM5D-RH, Hickey first used the console while doing monitors for a recent series of David Gray concerts. "The David Gray gigs were relatively straightforward with only six separate mixes, so it was a good way to learn the desk," he says. "For this show, it couldn't be more different. I'm using 64 channels, 24 auxes, three direct outputs and four matrices. I've also been investigating the add-on effects in the V2 software on the PM5D-RH. I have two RevX hall and two RevX plate reverbs on the brass section, snare, BV's and Beverley Knight's vocal."
With such a big choir, one of the main problems is making sure the conductor and band can hear the choir and vice versa. Hickey achieved this by feeding five flown stacks of L-Acoustics ARCS pointing at the main body of the choir from matrix one of the PM5D. A second matrix was feeding additional in-house arrays, for the top bleachers all the way round one end of the arena.
(Jim Evans)
