CHESSINGTON, ENGLAND — George Michael made his return to the world’s arena stages using two DiGiCo D5 Lives for front of house sound with a D5T on band monitors. But for the first Wembley show, a third D5 was added to mix the sound for a live television broadcast.
Engineers Ruadhri Cushan and Niall Flynn were in charge of mixing sound via the DiGiCo console.
“Both Niall and I were a little apprehensive, mainly because we both come from a studio background and the idea of doing a live mix straight to TV was a little scary,” Ruadhri says. “If we were going to pull it off we would need to get familiar with the D5 very quickly, so when DiGiCo invited us down to their demo rooms to run through it, we jumped at the chance.”
Although only part of the show was broadcast live, the entire tour was being recorded. The existing setup included two stage racks with 56 inputs into each, those 112 lines feeding the two D5s and D5T. Adding an additional D5 into the chain was straightforward.
“A PC-based ADK system using Samplitude software was used to record the shows, which seems to be one of the few bits of kit that was capable of recording all 112 inputs simultaneously for up to three hours at a time,” Ruadhri says. “This also got a feed directly from the stage racks, which meant we were able to play back previously recorded shows to start building a mix, while getting to grips with the console at DiGiCo’s premises.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge was ‘stadium spill” from Michael’s mic.
“We had some reconfiguring to do for Wembley, we had added some extra audience mics which needed to be sent to the broadcast truck separately from our music mix,” Ruadhri says. “The show passed very smoothly.”
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