DiGiCo SD9 Tours With Hard Rock Rising On The Road

The climax of Hard Rock Rising On The Road, the European mobile music tour organized by Hard Rock Cafe will happened in Rome on July 12, with a major live show, Hard Rock Live Roma taking place across two stages in the city’s Piazza del Popolo. In the lead up to it, a DiGiCo SD9 had been mixing the 15-date European tour, featuring some of Europe’s hottest musical up and coming talent.

Taking in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Florence, and Malta before the Rome show, the tour traveled over 8,000 miles and required fast set ups, sound checks, and turnarounds.

Touring Europe with an articulated truck stage and a long wheelbase van and just four personnel is a tough assignment, so a compact but versatile and fast to set up mixing console was essential. This is why Darren from ProTechTour and Hard Rock Cafe chose a DiGiCo SD9.

“There are two guys setting the stage up and two of us doing Front of House and monitor sound, lighting, backline, sorting out the generators, driving the van, tour managing – basically everything!” he says. “The longest drive between shows is about 2,700 miles, so it’s quite an undertaking for four people. We’ve got very limited space and I chose the SD9 because of  its footprint  and we can run a cat5 multicore, which also saves a lot of space. Despite its compact size, the console has more than enough effects and graphic equalizers, it does everything I need it to for mixing both FOH and monitors.”

To accommodate the tour’s needs, the SD9’s D-Rack is expanded to 16 outputs, routed to an Ecler CKL PA and Martin Audio Blackline monitors.

“I haven’t used a DiGiCo desk for about five years, but if you watch the online videos you can understand it very easily. I think I had to make two phone calls to the office, that was all. It is very intuitive,” says Darren. “We save a show file at each venue, then I load it and tweak the system at the next show, save a new show file for that venue and so on,” he continues. “I’m snapshotting everything for each band at their sound check, so I can just recall it for the performance. I’m using the Macro buttons to do my aux sends and I’m really happy. There have been no problems at all.”