One of London’s premier rehearsal facilities, Music Bank regards the most up-to -date equipment as an essential aspect of making the transition from rehearsal to live performance is as seamless as possible.

‘When an engineer steps into one of our rooms, they know they will have a familiar rig that they can step up to and use straight away,’ explainns facility manager, Jimmy Mac. ‘With so many different makes and models of digital mixing desk in the industry, having a powerful machine like the SD9 and a name like DiGiCo providing support is a winning combination.’

Following a training session for Music Bank’s studio technicians from DiGiCo’s Tim Shaxson, the SD9 has quickly seen been use on a number of sessions: ‘Everyone has commented on the desk’s logical use and the freedom to fully customise the layout to fit an individual’s needs,’ Mac says. ‘Being able to load show files and transfer them through the different models of the SD series means that the flexibility from gig to gig is great. Needing to run just a single Cat5 cable from the stage rack to the SD9 makes using it in any situation easy, while the virtual soundcheck feature helps the most demanding of bands to achieve the best sounding rehearsal and gig.’

Music Bank is also using a DiGiCo UB Madi, a simple USB-to-Madi converter that can record 48 tracks and connects to either Macs (running OS 10.7.4 onwards) or Windows 7 PCs via USB2.

‘The Madi USB interface allows extremely easy and fast recording methods live from the desk into your computer software,’ says Music Bank studio tech, Will Taylor. ‘It has saved me a lot of time when soundchecking bands and even getting a live session recoded. Again, it’s simplicity more than complements its use, with two cables to it and one out, it doesn’t clutter up the rest of the desk and is a powerful tool to have alongside the SD9.’

More: www.digico.org