The stage was once again on a revolving system, to account for the quick band change overs, with an A/B set up of splits, front of house and monitor systems and trucks. Two DiGiCo D5 Lives sat at the front of house position with engineers Chris Coxhead and Chris Morrison at the A and B consoles respectively. Mike 'Bunny' Warren operated the show/presenter console. DiGiCo's Tim Shaxson sat at a further, offline, D5 that was used by guest engineers to check their settings.
"Our main role was to help the visiting band engineers to set up, or modify, existing D5 session files which would work with the system at Wembley," explains Coxhead. "And if there was no FOH engineer, then we would mix that band."
The bands' engineers had varying experience on DiGiCo consoles. Some, like Trevor Gilligan, Kasabian's front of house, were happy to be mixing on their console of choice. Others, such as Snow Patrol's Snake Newton, were less familiar but still confident in their ability to use the console and in the D5's ability to perform. "I've used a D5 a few times before, so this really wasn't a problem," says Newton. "In fact, I'd like to have more of a chance to test it out fully."
All the consoles, plus another D5 specifically for Madonna, were fed into a DiGiCo D1, the routing board for the PA system.
Audio systems engineers for the event were Sherif el Barbari, Nico Royan and Davide Lombardi who set up flown EV X-Line and Outline Butterfly systems to work in conjunction with the house PA, which was utilised on the upper tiers of the stadium. "Absolutely everything came down to the D1," explains el Barbari. "All of the band mixes came to the D1 and from there I sent them to the Dolby Lake matrix system and on to an Iris system, which gave me total control."
Down at monitors, DiGiCo's Roger Wood had the task of prepping the sessions for the two D5s on duty there. "Again, we used the same set up as we had for the Concert for Diana and as was at front of house," says Wood. Britannia Row's Jon Lewis, Ben Phillips and Graham Blake were on hand to assist guest engineers.
(Jim Evans)
