Digico audio consoles have stayed plenty busy lately as productions from across the globe have opted for Digico consoles in recent months, including Broadway musical Kinky Boots; the Spice-Girls inspired musical Viva Forever! in London, and regional theaters in Tatab nya, Hungary, Kinky Boots Has Broadway On Its Feet
Sound designer John Shivers [pictured with Associate Sound Designer & Production Sound Engineer David Patridge] opted for a DiGiCo SD7T to handle the production of the new hit broadway musical Kinky Boots. He selected the console after becoming familiar with the system on his previous productions for Bonnie & Clyde, Sister Act and The Lion Kingoverseas.
A few years ago, I saw a brief demo at Masque Sound when the SD7 first became available, he recollected. Seeing the feature set and the redundant engine and power supply all onboard got me interested. When designing The Lion King for Singapore in 2010, part of my negotiation involved suggesting that we swap out the Cadacs with SD7s in New York and London for both creative and financial reasons. Before I knew it, I'd gotten an email telling me to move forward. Within 6 weeks of that conversation we were implementing the SD7s on the New York show and a month after that we were doing the same in London. I've been using SD7s pretty much on every show since.
Shivers says the console offers a lot of flexibility, especially with the new T software, which he says brings features and functionality specific to our needs on theatrical productions as well as a solid sounding foundation in a very compact package.
The SD7T software has added these very beneficial features thanks to [award-winning sound designer] Andrew Bruce's involvement in the development. Having onboard compression, gating and delay along with the programmability and recallability of those parameters on every channel opens up possibilities that you just can't have with an analog console. It's definitely been an upgrade for us from that standpoint. A positive byproduct has definitely been the size of the console, which allows you to get into smaller spaces and require less seats and has served as a large financial windfall for producers. For me, from a purely creative and design standpoint, it's about the capabilities of the console. I'm not one to follow the crowd necessarily, but the SD7 has become a standard of our industry and the reason everybody's using them seems clear. It has proven itself to be a very capable and reliable console.
Digico SD Consoles Spice Up London's West End
Girl Power is back and, since mid-December, has taken over London's Piccadilly Theatre, as the musical Viva Forever! brings the Spice Girls hits to the West End via a pair of of DiGiCo mixing consoles.
The show's sound designer is Bobby Aitken, who is no stranger to musical theatre, having produced sound designs for some of the world's most successful shows, including We Will Rock You, Mamma Mia and, most recently, the opening and closing ceremonies for London's Olympic and Paralympic games.
For some years his console of choice has been from British manufacturer DiGiCo. This production is no different, with an SD7T at Front of House and an SD8 handling the monitor mix's for the show's live musicians. Both consoles, along with the rest of Bobby's equipment requirements, are supplied by Autograph Sound.
The SD7T's suitability stems from a number of reasons, not least the production's high channel count.
We have an A/B audio system effectively two complete systems to avoid unwanted audio issues from the actors' microphones, which include 24 Sennheiser SK5212s and seven SKM5200s, says Viva Forever! head of sound Ben Evans. This set up means double the amount of outputs and double the amount of processing required within the desk, so the SD7T was the best choice.
Bobby explained, Because we mic the performers with onmi capsules, it's very common to hear a destructive phasing sound when we open multiple mics. Its very noticeable during duets when the performers get close to each other. The only way to get round it is never to mix the two mics together. So, they route to separate busses on the mixer, through separate amplifiers, separate reverbs and effects, separate processors and, ultimately, separate loudspeaker systems. The signal for the mics never meet each other till they are in air. This technique was developed by Martin Levan in the late 80 s but, because of the high demand on mix busses, was always very difficult to fully implement. The high buss count on the DiGiCo products makes it possible.
Needing two lots of everything' made the SD7T the ideal console for the show. Also, it has been specifically designed for theatre audio and that makes a real difference, says Ben. There are a lot of little functions that have been developed within the T software that help us do things more quickly and efficiently.
On this show we use around 150 Snapshots as the console is firing sound effects and changing control groups to maintain the A/B integrity. If there are multiple cues within a song, you can ask the desk not to change the faders during that song, so you can step through the cues, changing your allocations for the control groups and firing sound effects without upsetting the mix of the band it's little things like that that make it a lot easier for us to do what we want to do.
DiGiCo has also made huge steps forward with the software, he continues. Over the past few years they have adopted suggestions made by operators which have made our lives at lot easier. It has made the creative stuff that the designer wants achievable with a lot more ease. There's a lot of time pressure in technical rehearsals, being able to do everything quickly and never hear the stage
