Francis, who is approaching his eighth year of using DiGiCo consoles almost exclusively, comments, "It's very, very easy to mix music on this console and it works in a very straightforward manner. It's got everything you'd ever need onboard. For the last two years I've been using a Waves SoundGrid server, but prior to that I didn't - I just used the console and nothing else."
Although he typically favours DiGiCo's SD10 desk, Francis switched to the SD7-supplied by VER Tour Sound-for The Honeymoon Tour in order to better accommodate the show's 90-input channel count. "It's a blend of track and live inputs, with the emphasis on live inputs," he says, including multiple keyboards, guitar, bass, drums and a small string section. "The only thing that is obviously track is her background vocals. She did all of the backgrounds on the record, so the only way to make it sound right was to continue that."
The SD7's snapshot capabilities are proving to be invaluable on this tour: "It's pop, so the levels are pretty drastically different from song to song. On a lot of the songs there's an intro section, then into the regular song, so I use at least one snapshot to set up each song. A couple of the songs have more than one," he says.
The DiGiCo's multiband dynamic equalizers and compressors are also essential to his mix, says Francis, who groups drums, bass, keyboards and other instruments separately. "I take all of those groups into yet another group of all the music and create a separate path that's all of the vocals. I treat the two paths completely separately, then I combine them into the Meyer Sound Leo/Lyon PA system."
(Jim Evans)
