UK - Keane20, Hope and Fears, was the hotly anticipated tour from Keane, celebrating 20 years since their debut album was released in 2004. The tour continues with festival dates around the world over the summer.
For Philip Harvey at the front of house position and Hannah Brodrick on monitors, it was important the set-up was as streamlined as possible, so using DiGiCo consoles for shared stage racking was essential. Utilising KLANG for immersive mixes kept the monitor footprint compact, while at front of house, the integration of Quantum’s onboard technologies ensured the workflow was efficient and consistent across all venues.
Harvey is an engineer with over 25 years of experience touring. For the Keane20 tour the brief was clear: working within the ethos of a striped back, clean-lined stage design, the sound set-up needed to justify every centimetre of space and DiGiCo’s hard working consoles were the way forward.
“In the formative days of the tour, the request was made to keep production as simple and as compact as possible,” Harvey says. “The Quantum 338 features were a key factor in the choice to use DiGiCo. The availability of dynamic EQs and multi-band compressors on every channel provides a safety net to catch and compress potentially offending frequencies that might jump out of an input (or output) inadvertently from song to song.”
Brodrick has also toured with high profile artists for many years and is co-director and co-founder of Women in Live Music. For her, it is KLANG that has been a surprise bonus. DMI-KLANG integrates seamlessly into the workflow of the SD12, creating immersive mixes without any additional outboard equipment.
“I’m using an SD12 96, running at 96kHz, with one SD Rack and a Nano Rack for extra inputs, all with 32bit input cards,” she says. “I don’t need any external kit for KLANG or recording, just the two cards that sit in the back of the desk and a couple of bits of ethernet. I had read an article about rock band Sigur Rós’s monitor set up and they were using a SD12 with KLANG. Everything fitted neatly into a flight case that was the same width as the desk sitting on top and I thought ‘Yep that’s how I want to roll (quite literally) this summer’.
“I was a little daunted by the idea of KLANG to begin with, but talking to Phil Kamp and following the YouTube videos really helped. It’s a compact set-up and the processing power of the SD12 is just right.”
“I still remember mixing on the D5,” Harvey concludes. “I think the evolution of DiGiCo’s desks, with their technological and user workflow advancements, has been extraordinary. The Quantum Series is definitely the pinnacle of this evolution.”
