Over the four decades of its running, Rock Wercher has grown to become one of the largest music festivals in Belgium. Staged in the small village of Werchter, Head of Sound, Patrick Demoustier, too the sound system fully into digital operation for 2015. His mixing consoles of choice were from DiGiCo.

‘We had talked a lot about moving Rock Werchter’s house system from analogue to digital consoles and how we were going to do it,’ he says. ‘We didn’t want to take any risks; if it went wrong and the experience was bad, our reputation would be bad too.

‘We decided we could only do it using DiGiCo consoles because DiGiCo’s architecture is very straightforward, even for those who don’t already know the products. In the analogue world, everyone was so familiar with one particular brand of console that it was easy, but in the digital world there are many different brands and different systems, mostly with session files that aren’t compatible. But if you know how to use an analogue console you can pretty much mix on a DiGiCo straight away. I believe they are the only consoles on which that you can learn that fast. Also, all our engineers are very familiar with them and that’s important; if you have someone sitting next to you that really knows the console it makes life much easier and gives confidence to the visiting engineers.’

As a result, the festival’s production supplier, PRG, provided a combination of SD7 consoles at FOH, with SD10s at monitors for all three stages, while DiGiCo’s Belgian distributor Amptec replicated the live sound set-up with an SD7 and SD10 for the newly instated backstage prep area, where engineers were able to check their sessions, or make new sessions if needed.

An engineer from Amptec and another from PRG were present in the backstage prep area, making sure the right sessions went on to the right desk. As an added level of comfort, DiGiCo sent support from its UK office in the form of Product Specialist Dave Bigg. ‘We know the consoles really well but having Dave there gave an extra level of service to the bands and they really appreciated it,’ Demoustier says. ‘They knew that nothing could go wrong because there was someone from the DiGiCo there.’

The backstage prep area isn’t an entirely new concept as DiGiCo has been running the same facility at the Montreux Jazz Festival since it became one of the Festival’s sponsors in 2009. ‘This was where I got the idea from,’ Demoustier says. ‘It’s all about confidence for the engineers. If they’re feeling relaxed, then there’s no problem.’

With a proportion of bands carrying control systems with them on the festival circuit, uptake for the house consoles was consistent with expectation: ‘On the main stage we had an average of two out of eight bands a day using the house consoles,’ Demoustier says. ‘On the Marquee and the Club C stages that increased to around 50 per cent. Everyone really liked the DiGiCos. I was actually quite surprised when we sent out the specs of the festival; I expected a lot more people to come back and say “we can’t use DiGiCo because we only have a session for a different console”, but most were happy to work with DiGiCo straight away.

‘It all went really smoothly and everyone was very happy. My impression was that it was even better than when we used to use analogue desks. With an analogue desk, you have to start your set-up from scratch, but with the new prep room names, IO settings high-pass filters, basic EQ settings and FX presets, were dialled in and some compression was already set on the right channels, so the start point was at a higher level than ever before.’

In fact, Demoustier and his team felt the DiGiCo experience was such a success that they are going to take it to Belgium’s Pukkelpop festival in August. ‘Pukkelpop has more stages than Rock Werchter,’ he says. ‘We’re doing around five out of the eight stages there and we’re trying to do as much as we can with DiGiCo because we really liked the experiment.

‘I don’t know of many festivals that do things this way. I think it’s a major step forward for us and for DiGiCo.’

More: www.digico.biz