With more than 25 years as a sound engineer working on tour and in the studio with acts as diverse as Tina Turner, BB King, U2 and Sting, Emmy-award winning engineer Chris Trimby is well placed to choose a mixing console. Now on the road for more than 50 dates worldwide with the Manic Street Preachers, is using a Midas Pro6, supplied by leading UK rental company SSE Audio. ‘It’ll be my first choice wherever I go now,’ he says. ‘It’s way ahead of anything else.’

 

According to Trimby, Midas’ biggest achievement has been to design a digital board which retains an analogue feel and Midas sound. ‘It’s laid out very intuitively,’ he says. ‘Everything’s only one or two button pushes away, whether you’re hitting a channel or hitting the EQ button. You can manoeuvre yourself round the board very quickly. The preamps, probably the most important part of any console, are fantastic.’

For the Manics tour, in support of the band’s tenth studio album, Postcards From A Young Man, Triby is also taken by the desk’s Area B finction, which allows an operator to set up their own emergency ‘grab’ section. For the Manics, who use some hard drive input for sections such as strings, Area B hosted a click to enable the drummer to synchronise his timing correctly. ‘It’s a brilliant idea,’ he says. ‘You have the most important things to hand without having to go and look for them.’

The delay feature on the output section enables Trimby to delay various wedges to side fill, or occasionally rear wedges to front wedges as needed. ‘It makes a real difference,’ he reports. ‘It gives you coherence at the high end and solidness at the low end.’

He also praises the separate library filing system: ‘When you get on to a console with your USB you can just access your own personal library and then all you need do is to make small adjustments as necessary. Setting that up manually by hand would take ages, but it’s just a matter of minutes on digital.

‘I didn’t make much use of the automation files on this tour but I could see from the way the desk is laid out that the filing system would have been very easy to use if you have different musicians all on in-ears playing each other’s instruments with different styles and different levels,’ he adds.

‘I started my career on Midas consoles,’ he concludes, ‘and they were leagues ahead of anyone then. Maybe the gap narrowed over the intervening years, but with the Pro6 they have leapt ahead again.’

More: www.midasconsoles.com