SOUTHWOLD, England — With the bands changing within 15 minutes on stage, sound engineers at this year’s Latitude Festival didn’t have much time to get acquainted with the nuances of a new digital console.
But Adlib Audio provided two Soundcraft Vi6 digital mixing consoles along with two mentors — Walter Jaquiss at the Uncut Arena and Otto Kroymann in the Sunrise Arena — who said the visiting engineers had a positive experience.
“Adlib were conscious of having to put out a desk that everyone could mix on easily,” said Jaquiss. He set up a system in the Uncut Arena where all show files were created off-line. “For those (engineers) who arrived with no show file I would take the patch from stage and create the file on a laptop.
“I had already created a generic festival setup and this allowed us to mix things around, move layers, change effects, etc., and save to key. You wouldn’t have time to reconfigure the gates, comps and VCAs on an analog desk.”
With 27 out of the 30 bands using the resident desk, being able to create offline proved a significant advantage — and once the engineers had taken up the pilot’s seat they found the operating experience intuitive.
“The desk is laid out visually and everything they needed was right in front of them — any fear factor would evaporate straight away,” said Walter Jaquiss. “It all becomes easier when it’s assigned offline — and the freedom to then be able to reassign later is fantastic.”
A bonus for Jaquiss has been the arrival of Soundcraft’s v3.0 software, and the ability to take the generic festival patch from an Excel spreadsheet (using .csv files) and copy and paste channel labels.
“To be able to do this with all 40 channels and then export them to your USB key — having already had them in another spread sheet — is fantastic. This would normally take a lot of time and it helps if [engineers] can see a personalized layout.
Over at the Sunrise stage, Kroymann was undergoing a similar manic routine — but again, his knowledge of the Vi6 proved helpful.
“Quite a few sound engineers were using the Vi6 for the first time, but everyone said how absolutely brilliant the experience was,” Kroyman said.
“None of the sound engineers brought their own show files and so we had a rolling template, and incoming engineers would build on [the sound structure] the engineer before had created. Everyone who walked away from the desk commented on the Vi6’s ease of use and how simple it was to bring up any parameter. They all left the desk with a good feeling.”
In view of the lack of time, many engineers used the board like an analog surface with the digital features added on top. “This worked brilliantly,” Kroyman said.
For Jaquiss and Kroymann there had hardly been time to draw breath over the three days — and both credited the user-friendly features of the Vi6 for helping them get past the finishing line unscathed.
For more information, please visit www.soundcraft.com and www.harman.com.
