With a stated preference for the old Midas analogue warhorse, how's he finding the Yamaha? "Overall it's sounding great, the band think so too; it's a busy show with lots of musicians," plus, of course, the addition of Paul Rogers as front man. "And there's a 12m thrust stage out in the audience, so there's loads of different mixes to provide; I'm using all 24 outs and 3 Matrix sends. What first struck me about the desk is I like the way you can make it feel like an analogue desk."
May then imparts a cautionary word to engineers: "The weakest link in this equation is always yourself - until you're one hundred percent conversant with the desk, whatever make, you're going to be limited." Has that happened to you? "No, but the key is to make sure you start off keeping it simple, then build in the recall scenes."
That said, May's set-up is far from simple, those outputs mentioned above feed two sets of in-ears and a multiplicity of wedges and fills, and he's using off-board digital dynamics control (XTA DP324 SiDD). "I find I need that to boost the output. That said, the on-board EQ is excellent, so too the gates and compressors. In fact, I find I barely need the on-board EQ because the desk itself doesn't really colour the signal at all," Which says a great deal about the quality of what he's getting from the musicians.
"My only real need is for more graphics, there's just not enough on board so I'm using a Yamaha digital mix engine, the DME64, to fill that need . . . The user interface is a bit fiddly, I could do with it being a bit more user-friendly, but Yamaha are very good at that. I've already spoken to them about this and my experience tells me that they listen to such suggestions. That's one of the better features of Yamaha; they take in everything you say."
In the bigger scheme of things the change from analogue to digital mixing is slight as far as the band are concerned, the impact of Rogers' presence being far more significant. However, the PM5D has given May the ability to provide a large number of distinctly different mixes - not only for changes in stage location, but also to accommodate steep dynamic variations song to song - a fact that hasn't escaped the band's attention. One good reason why May already has the desk booked for the entire world tour.
(Lee Baldock)
