Monitor engineer Dave Guerin recently road-tested the DiGiCo D5 Version 4 upgrade for The Pogues’ Christmas tour. Entec Sound and Light supplied the console, along with the rest of the monitor gear.
[With the upgrade,] now you can easily see the graphic that is inserted on the selected output and it’s immediately available. As soon as you select the output, the graphic’s there. You can also be listening to one output, but select a different mix to the one you are listening to, which means you can adjust the reverb send while listening to where the reverb is returning to. Guitarist James Walbourne has a full mix of drums, accordion, banjo and main vocal, plus his vocal and acoustic. [Guest vocalist] Ella Finer uses the same wedges but with a totally different mix of just her vocal and a bit of the main vocal. On an analog desk, there would be lots of buttons having to be turned off. On the D5, with one fader I can change between the mix for James and the mix for Ella in the same set of wedges.
