Their 2010 European Summer Tour marks the reformation of Irish rock band, The Cranberries. New at the monitor desk, engineer Oliver Waring took station at a DiGiCo SD8 digital mixing console.
‘I’ve been working with The Cranberries for a couple of months now and I’d inherited a console from another manufacturer that wasn’t my first choice,’ he says. ‘I changed to the SD8 and at the first soundcheck, and after just one song, the band commented how different it sounded – that it was a lot crisper, a lot clearer and they knew straight away that something had changed.’
Waring’s like of DiGiCo products in general is due to the amount of flexibility they afford him: ‘I’ve been using DiGiCo consoles for a number of years,’ he continues. ‘I started out teching with a D5 when I was looking after Dave Guerin, monitor engineer for Morrissey. Then I inherited the monitor position and looked after Morrissey for a couple of years on the D5, later upgrading to an SD7.
‘There are features they have that, from a monitor engineer’s point of view, I haven’t seen on any other desk. It’s great to have the ability to move the faders to any bank on the desk. I can have outputs next to inputs and control groups completely customised, all of which means complete flexibility.’
Waring had found the move from a D5 to an SD7 was a big jump in quality and was interested to know that both sonically and in terms of software, the SD8 was the same as the SD7. ‘The transition down a level was very simple, no effort at all,’ he says. ‘It’s just like the SD7, but with less horse power.
‘I also love the fact that I’ve got auxiliary rotaries on each bank, so regardless of which channel I have selected, I can be dialling in to one mix, while dealing with something else. I like to be able to twiddle the knobs and do things like you would on an analogue console, and be able to do more than one thing at once with more than one channel. I was blessed with two hands, so I may as well use them!’
While the band s mainly uses in-ear monitors with side fills as back up, drummer Fergal Lawler prefers wedge monitors instead. ‘This set-up means that the SD8’s graphic EQs are ideal,’ Waring says. ‘I have two graphic EQs on my sidefills and I’ve set up a macro to punch the second one in. Delores [O’Riordan], our singer, has a habit of running right into the sidefill when she’s dancing, so I’ve got a button on the macro section straight to the second sidefill GEQ for whenever she’s there. I just tap it in and it takes all of those nasty features right out. Perfect.’
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