Canadian troubadour Tom Cochrane and his band, Red Rider, are on the road again traveling with the InnovaSon Grand Live digital mixing console at FOH and the new Sy40 at monitors. Manned by FOH engineer/tour manager Ettore DeDivitiis and monitor engineer Mark “Cubby” Radu, the consoles, supplied by PA Plus in Toronto, are accompanying multimillion-record-selling singer/songwriter Cochrane as hetours the U.S. and Canada through the summer.
DeDivitiis, an eight-year veteran, said that the technically savvy Cochrane took little convincing to adopt the consoles. “We talked him into using the InnovaSons mainly for their ease of use,” he commented. “With the keyboard, there are so many shortcuts. Whenever you want to see your compressors onscreen, it’s Alt+B. Hit the Select button on any input or output and it comes up on the screen. All the knobs are in front of you. It’s almost like working with an analog board, where you can grab things quickly. I find the onboard processing to be really nice. I use all the comps, gates, everything onboard. So I didn’t have to have a ton of racks out front. I had a drive rack with some effects and the InnovaSon. We have minimal stage gear, so with the InnovaSons, it made the truck pack quicker with less crew people at load-in, so you save union costs. And when you’re doing theaters, for financial reasons, you don’t want to kill a lotof seats. It saves everywhere.
“Because I was road managing,” DeDivitiis continued, “Mark Radu took care of setting up monitors, flying the P.A. and throwing the front of house up for me. It was a one-man job, with eight boxes a side and four subs a side—whether they were flown or ground-stacked—and he was up and running and making noise within two hours.”
Said Radu of the U.S. gigs: “That was the biggest advantage: having the whole rig self-contained within the console and one rack. It’s basically a remote rack, an in-ear rack and the console. We built an analog 32-channel split to be able to throw the [venue’s] front of house a set of tails.”
For more on the tour, visit www.innovason.com.
