Coldplay and its DiGiCo SD7 at Glastonbury 2011
New York (August 8, 2011)—-This summer, Coldplay is headlining no less than 15 festivals around the world, all with a DiGiCo SD7 at the FOH position.
Coldplay’s busy summer includes headline appearances at Rock am Ring / Rock im Park (Germany), Jammin’ (Italy), Pinkpop (Netherlands), Glastonbury and T In The Park (UK), Where The Action Is (Sweden), Open’er (Poland), Rock Werchter (Belgium), Main Square (France), Optimus Alive (Portugal), BBK Live (Spain), Oxegen (Ireland), Fuji Rock (Japan) and Rock In Rio (Brazil).
Front of House engineer Daniel Green worked closely with Wigwam Acoustics to put together a brand new, bespoke rig for the festival tour, designed around a DiGiCo SD7 console. “We have a really good relationship with Dan and Tony Smith, the band’s head of sound, so we were happy to spend time working with them to put together what is effectively a bespoke system,” says Wigwam’s Alex Hadjigeorgiou. “Everything has to be absolutely right for them to put on the best show. As a hire company, it’s really good to work with people whose priority is quality rather than just cost.”
“Because Dan is also heavily involved in the band’s recordings, he knows exactly how he wants them to sound live,” Alex continues. “He is very meticulous, so he came to us and spent time listening to a lot of different options. It was a good window of opportunity to go right back to basics and effectively start from scratch. With DiGiCo consoles now being compatible with Waves, the SD7’s combination of high channel count and redundancy was ideal.”
Waves 8 is running on both the SD7’s engines, the rig includes two DiGiRacks on stage and some outboard routed via AES. “We took the opportunity to go right back to basics with Dan and, ironically, it has meant that some outboard processing has returned to his racks. Units like the Eventide H8000, which have multiple channels of AES, can be seamlessly integrated with the SD7 and add versatility to what is available from the Waves plug-ins and SD7’s onboard processing.”
Another feature of the rig is that every show is recorded via MADI on to a Macintosh running Cubase. “The band wanted to be able to release live recordings that would be available from the iTunes store very quickly,” says Alex. “It’s a slick operation; for example, the hard drives from the Glastonbury performance went on the helicopter with the band straight to the studio and a track was released within a couple of days.”
DiGiCo
www.digico.org
