| June 2007 | |
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DIGICO D1 MAKES GREAT ESCAPE LIGHT WORK |
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As Brighton’s Great Escape Festival entered its second year, the city’s most prominent PA hire company, Alstublieft Audio, discovered the benefits that using a DiGiCo console brings to a festival situation. Headed up by Giles Bristow, Alstublieft was employed by festival organisers The Barfly Group to look after audio production across the entire festival, which this year featured around 150 bands playing across 20 venues. With so much going on, and several larger gigs from bands such as The Happy Mondays, Captain and The Magic Numbers, Bristow knew he would need to make the most of DiGiCo’s great sound and user-friendly interface. A DiGiCo a D1 Live 48MDR, featuring a local Minirack and eight analogue I/O and eight AES I/O at FOH, and a stage rack with 48 in and out, was deemed the ideal product to deal for shows at the Corn Exchange and The Brighton Centre, East Wing: “Initially Giles was a little hesitant about using a digital desk in a festival situation,” says DiGiCo’s technical sales manager, Tim Shaxson, who was on site throughout to lend a hand. “We prepped the desk with a generic template that could be altered to suit each venue, act and engineer. The console was used by 15 acts over the course of three days and all the guys who walked up to the desk, even those who had never used a DiGiCo desk before, were instantly at home with it, dispelling any concerns that Giles may have had.” This method of working enabled fast changeovers between bands, as well as shorter time between sound checks, as each engineer was able to save all of his settings and desk layout, which could then be instantly recalled as needed. Alstublieft’s FOH/system engineer Reay Grant slipped behind the D1 with ease: “He was over the moon with the desk and said that of all the digital consoles he had used, the DiGiCo was by far the easiest and most logical,” recalls Shaxson. Alstublieft provided an external effects rack, but many of the engineers were more than happy to use all of the features integrated into the D1 including EQ, reverb, delay and dynamics. “Although none of the engineers had any training on the desk before hand (we did offer it to all of them in advance), they all were able to get straight into it during sound check. It all went really well,” Shaxson explains. “At the end of the three days, Giles had some excellent comments from the festival organisers and he now realises the advantages of using a DiGiCo console in that environment.”
Press Contacts: Sarah James at Gasoline Media |
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