| December 2007 | |
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DIGICO's D5 PROVES A HIT WITH DAVID GRAY |
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November saw singer/songwriter David Gray and his four-piece backing band hit the road to promote his latest Greatest Hits album. The tour started in the UK, climaxing in three shows at the Roundhouse in London and features a DiGiCo D5 console with ProTools recording system at Front of House. It is also the first time that Gray’s FOH engineer Graham Pattison has specified a DiGiCo console, so a few eyebrows were raised when he asked for one from tour audio provider Skan Audio. But Graham is unequivocal in his praise for the desk. “Some time ago I was working with Gomez in Australia and in one venue I had to use a DiGiCo D1,” he says. “At the time I was a strictly analogue engineer, so I had that natural ‘instant aversion’ reaction, but the guy who owned it knew it inside out, he could configure it how I wanted and make suggestions that I didn't know about. To my surprise, within half an hour we had configured it exactly how it made sense to me and therefore I found it a joy to use. It really was straightforward.” “However,” he smiles, “up until a few weeks ago, the thought of me actually specifying a digital board was still unthinkable, but the opportunity to keep the footprint small and have a very flexible system made a D5 an obvious choice.” Having finished a European tour with another artist, Graham had just a weekend off before he was straight into pre-production at David Gray’s east London studio. “The band and monitor engineer were upstairs, I was downstairs and there was the optical link between us,” he says. “Tim Shaxson from DiGiCo came in to help me set the console up and I was in business straight away.” Graham describes Gray’s way of working as “incredibly organic” and felt that he was unlikely to use the D5’s snapshots as he feels they can induce laziness at the FOH position. However, once Tim had given him a quick introductory course in the feature… “I suddenly had 25 songs programmed into the board and was asking myself ‘How did that happen?’” he laughs. “The Snapshot feature is incredibly easy to use. I’ve found editing scenes and the functionality of recall safes really complicated on other digital desks but, with the DiGiCo system, it’s really easy and quick to edit and rename scenes while a band is on stage.” Indeed, so natural was the working process with the D5, Gray and his band forgot that Graham was even there, which ironically also highlighted the stability and reliability of the D5. “On the second day of rehearsal, the transparency of the D5’s working process meant that they had completely forgotten I was even in the building,” Graham smiles. “I was taking a break and had gone out for something to eat and the others, being in a different part of the building, came out a little later. Forgetting I was working, they had locked up and switched all the power off. This, of course, turned the D5 off. But once I rebooted it, everything was there. Absolutely nothing had been lost. It caused no problems at all.” Graham has even higher praise for the D5’s flexibility when it comes to recording. David Gray likes to record all his live shows, so there was a certain amount of apprehension on Graham’s part as to how it would be achieved with the D5. “I had been looking into MADI recording, but to me that was more a broadcast thing. So, to be honest, I didn’t actually know what I was getting, but what I got was absolutely fantastic.” A Solid State Logic Delta Link MADI - ProTools converter is the key to the system, linked directly to a Macintosh running ProTools and giving Graham 56 inputs and 56 outputs of intuitive, trouble-free recording. “I use ProTools in my own studio and I’d been thinking well, I’ll need an audio interface for recording David’s shows,” Graham continues. “But when I saw the Delta Link solution I was dumbfounded. I was recording 48 tracks from upstairs during the day, then, when the band had gone home, I just played back the recording, routing the signal path in the opposite direction through the same channels with a single button push and it was just like having them up there playing. It’s an amazing facility for both pre-production and recording the shows themselves. I honestly didn’t realise it was that straightforward. I don’t think a lot of people know you can do that with a DiGiCo console.” Indeed, so impressed has Graham been that he immediately invested in the same solution for his own studio. Once the pre-production stage was over and the tour hit the road, Graham has continued to enjoy working with the D5. “The advantages over analogue consoles are well documented - the smaller footprint, sound quality, flexibility and so on,” he says. “But, ironically, I find many digital consoles are actually really inflexible. They are all based around layers, with fixed numbers of faders per layer, changing patches, editing and other things can be really counter-intuitive. If you’re doing a one-off show, you simply don’t have time to get into the guts of the operating system. “In contrast, the DiGiCo is the first digital desk I've encountered where you can move any fader anywhere, so you can tailor the the desk that it makes sense from a performance point of view, not just for patch convenience. This makes it much more intuitive than analogue.” And when it comes to sound quality, Graham’s biggest compliment is that he chose to use the DiGiCo preamps over the Avalon units that he habitually carries. “In this application the D5’s preamps sounded better, no question,” he says. “So now I just use the Avalons for EQ and compression.” Summing up, Graham adds: “I can’t deny that I was initially a little apprehensive about specifying the D5, but then Tim Shaxson gave me a list of clients that were currently out with DiGiCo consoles. All were very high profile artists, such as Madonna, who run many times more channels than I do - and I thought ‘Well, they're using it for a reason.' And it was absolutely the right decision for me.”
Press Contacts: Sarah James at Gasoline Media |
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