No Worries As DiGiCo Stands On the Side For Jacob Collier

With over 40,000 online subscribers from 156 countries, and more than two and a half million YouTube views, multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier is literally taking the world by storm with his unique sound.

Jacob performed his looped arrangements live at two recent high-profile gigs: Ronnie Scott s Jazz Club in London and at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Having several looping stations and lots of open microphones can be tricky, but as FOH engineer Ben Bloomberg explains having DiGiCo desks to work with meant he didn t have to worry about a thing.

The speed and flexibility is amazing. Having Flexi Channels that can easily switch between mono or stereo, the speed at which you can patch the desk, assign control groups, change the buss configuration, set up virtual sound check, even change the sample rate of several DSP cores and consoles all of that is just incredibly easy and can be done in the moment, even during a rehearsal. With other systems, you'd be sending the artists and crew on a break. says Ben.

Since starting MIT in 2007, Ben has worked for composer and Professor Tod Machover at the MIT Media Lab, touring internationally to design and support technology for his productions. I ve used just about every console at this point, but lately we see DiGiCo everywhere, he says.

At Ronnie Scott s, Ben was grateful for the smaller footprint of the SD10; not only could it fit inside the small FOH booth at the club, but he knew he could easily translate to the larger SD7 used for Montreux.

We re actually running Ableton Live in this performance which is very unusual for a jazz show, he says. There are six looping systems, all sequenced so that when Jacob walks up to a set of microphones, they are ready to record him. It's not often that one comes across bars of 11/4 or loops of seven on top of two in an Ableton set working with Jacob is incredibly rewarding because he's such an amazing talent and demands a lot of the audio systems and of the mixing engineer. He runs around the stage, playing instruments, and the computer knows where he is at any given time. Audio is sent to the desk via MADI using a MOTU 112D AVB interface. Together, the MOTU and DiGiCo console enable live manipulation of 32 audio paths to the six loopers with different lengths and configuration, all simultaneously.

It s not enough for Jacob s fascinating rhythms to simply be in time. Sound quality is of utmost importance and for that Ben doesn t need to look beyond the desk.

It sounds amazing, he concludes. It can run Waves but we don t need to, because the built-in effects sound so good. We re using everything; the muti-band EQ and dynamics, DiGiTuBe on the bass DI- everything is in the console. It s been a pleasure to work on this desk.

Press Contacts:

David Webster at DiGiCo

Tel: +44 1372 845600

Email:webby@digiconsoles.com

Web: www.digico.org

Sarah James at Gasoline Media

Tel: +44 1372 471472

Email: info@gasolinemedia.com

Web: www.gasolinemedia.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/sarah_gasoline

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