Undertaking an tour through Istanbul, Barcelona, Iceland, Berlin, Mexico City and San Francisco, Massive Attack needed a crew and a audio system to provide the concert experience on which their live reputation is built. For the band members themselves, audio engineer Paul Hatt used a Soundcraft Vi4 console to mix monitors.
Offering all of the features found on the larger Vi6, the Vi4 is easy to move between locations and occupies a small footprint. Hatt also used a 32-channel Soundcraft Compact Stagebox for the input extension beyond the fully-loaded Vi stage rack, plus a 64-channel stagebox for additional inputs.
‘This tour has been the most arduous outing I’ve put the Vi through to date,’ Hatt reflects. ‘It has been thrown about in local trucks, charter flights and endured both extreme heat and torrential rain. In southern Italy we rallied around building impromptu gazebos and placed fans around the desk as the direct sunlight and temperature became too intense, and then in Mexico we had to evacuate the stage after five songs due to an electrical storm. The desk just keeps going and duly boots up every day without issues.’
Since most of the programming was done in production rehearsals, a typical show day for the technical team starts with loading in early in the morning, followed by a line-check and a rollback on all the gear. They then return in the evening for another line-check before showtime. For Hatt, the absence of backline amps or loudspeakers on stage and a good separation of microphones to minimise spill provided a good mix environment: The shows we do are dynamic and scene-heavy from a mixing perspective,’ he says. ‘Everyone is on IEMs and there are two drum kits, acoustic and electric, the latter providing what can be quite radically different triggered sounds from one song to the next. It’s been great to really get a bit deeper into the snapshot capabilities of the Vi4. I’ve used this desk as a layered analogue console for years, but now I’ve had the chance to deal with it on a more technical level, and I’ve been very pleased with the results.’
Hatt also used Soundcraft’s Realtime Rack to bring UAD studio plug-ins to the Soundcraft platform: ‘The Realtime Rack gives me a blank canvas to introduce some very high-end plug-ins to the mix,’ he says. ‘Though I’m only scratching the surface of this technology on this tour, it’s a very elegant solution and the more I use it the more I like it. Ultimately, it hooks up easily via Madi and is a very exciting addition to the Vi environment.’
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