Front-of-house engineer Bryan Worthen is mixing a nine-date UK arena tour for Foo Fighters. He’s manning two DiGiCo D5s to handle the show’s double stages: the A stage for the main “electric” show (with an Electro-Voice X Line line array) and a smaller B stage (L-Acoustics V-DOSC and dV-DOSC) for the acoustic segment.
One desk does the A stage and the other desk does the B stage, but both can feed either P.A. That’s because there is a point in the show where I am pulling inputs from the A stage and feeding them through the B stage P.A., at the same time as inputs from the B stage are also feeding its own P.A. Dave [Grohl] plays on the B stage by himself with his A stage electric guitar, so his wireless system feeds the receiver and inputs on the A stage. However, he’s singing into the mic on the B stage, so I’m pulling the guitar signal from the A stage and feeding it through the B stage P.A. with his vocals. Halfway through, the rest of the band kicks in on the A stage, so I bring in the A stage P.A. and kill the B stage P.A. There is a lot going on — almost 90 inputs, and it’s quite complicated — but it works out really well. You just need to get your head around making it happen. The crowd goes crazy because they’re all looking at Dave on the B stage, and all of a sudden it gets big and loud behind them. Working from two consoles is much less confusing than doing it from one, which is what I tried to do before and it didn’t really work out.
