Kylie's front-of-house engineer Chris Pyne and system technician Tony Szabo have been with the singer for some considerable time. They have used a variety of equipment along the way, but Chris says he would opt for DiGiCo consoles any time. "I've been mixing Kylie for nine years now and she's one of the best live pop acts you could ever see," says Pyne. "I like mixing her on the D5. My personal opinion is, as an engineer, that you want as much information in front of you at any one time as you can possibly have in the live environment. So it's good to be able to look at the board and see all your channels in front of you." Pyne feels that the D5 gives him exactly that. "It's like driving a car, knowing where the speedo is, and not having to go: hang on, I've got to switch this so I can see how fast I'm going. That's a simplistic way of saying it, but it's my personal preference."
Showgirl was what Pyne describes as a far more 'even' show than previous ones. "It wasn't a big explosive start and then every song got bigger and better. It kind of just went up, stayed up and carried on like that to the end, where there was a sing-along bit with the mega hits at the very end."
But every song had a different feel and tempo, so the recall ability the D5 offers, as well as its superior sound quality, was very important to Chris. "I've used D5s quite a few times over the last couple of years, mainly with Kylie," adds Chris. "It's a learning curve with all the digital consoles, but it's an ergonomic learning curve. Because we've all been using analogue boards for so long you can practically shut your eyes, grab something and know exactly where it is. So with a digital console it's just a bit of a process that you learn - you have to do a certain number of steps to do something. But once you get that in your thinking, it's not difficult. The D5 sounds great and it didn't miss a beat throughout the whole tour."
A full review of Kylie's Showgirl tour appears in the June issue of Lighting&Sound International magazine, out soon.
(Lee Baldock)
