Sting’s recent Henley Festival show saw his regular engineer on hand to record the performance. And, although Donal Hodgson has recorded and mixed Sting for more than a decade, he is still ready to experiment with his gear…

‘I have been using Pro Tools in the studio, live on and off stage, but just recently broke free of my comfort zone and decided to try JoeCo’s BlackBox BBR64-Madi Recorder,’ says the award-winning engineer. ‘Sting has been using a Studer Vista 5 for FOH so I was very confident that the A-to-D would be good, and using the BlackBox meant I wouldn’t need to hire a van to carry my rig to the show, or upset production by taking up valuable seating space with a couple of big racks.

‘Actually, I was surprised how small my recording rig turned out to be,’ he continues. ‘All I needed was a 2U-high rack – 1U for the BBR and 1U for a Glyph GT062E HD. The BBR64-Madi is surprisingly small considering it records 64 tracks. And, as it has an external PSU it really doesn’t weigh very much. I liked the fact that the PSU has a small locking device and can’t accidentally be knocked or pulled out.

‘Connecting the device is simple; we used a fibre connection to the Studer console and a standard USB cable to connect the BBR to the hard drive,’ he explains. ‘My drive was Mac OS formatted, so I used the BBR64-Madi to reformat the drive to FAT32 in a matter of minutes. It was pretty easy to find and then set the clock ref to the Madi input and I was ready to record. All this I did without looking at the manual. I think it says a lot about the thought involved in the design if you can use a piece of gear without going straight to the manual. I could have plugged in a PC keyboard and named all the tracks and song titles in advance or do it after I had imported all the WAV files. I was really impressed with the simplicity and ease of use and I really like the safety features built into the unit, like having to hold the transport keys for a couple of seconds for them to respond. All in all the whole process for recording the show was extremely easy.’

Released in 2011, the BBR64-Madi Recorder records/replays up to 64 channels of Madi data at standard sample rates, without requiring a computer. Double sample rate recording (up to 96kHz) is also accommodated. The recorder additionally caters for 56-channel legacy Madi and can capture a further eight channels of analogue (balanced line in). Individual channels, or pairs of channels can be monitored on a PFL bus providing both hi-resolution metering and headphone monitoring. Specifically designed for secure use in a live recording environment, the BBR64-Madi includes a number of safety features such as the Safe ‘n’ Sound Record Recovery that will recover files in the event of a power failure.

More: www.joeco.co.uk