Two recent London events have seen audio supervisor/sound engineer Derrick Zieba in action behind a Midas XL8 digital mixing desk. Although Zieba has specified the Midas XL8 in his role as audio supervisor for high profile events such as the BRIT Awards and previous Classic BRITs, this year’s Rock Choir at Wembley Arena put him at the controls for the first time.

The Rock Choir phenomenon has swept the UK, with regional choirs coming together to sing rock, pop, gospel and Motown classics. Around 7,000 members of the regional choirs performed at the special Wembley gig, which was filmed as part of a TV documentary. For this show, Zieba made extensive use of the XL8’s ‘mix minus’ feature. This routes all channels to the bus by default, allowing the operator to choose which channels to switch off or ‘minus’ from that bus output. ‘With three quarters of Wembley taken up by participating choirs and only a quarter of actual audience, I needed the ability to switch outputs easily between a full mix including choir mics and a monitor mix without choir on certain speakers,’ he explains. ‘The ‘mix minus’ feature made my job of satisfying two quite different audio requirements in the room considerably easier.’

A few days earlier, Zieba had specified the XL8 to run with an Outline loudspeaker system for the Classic BRITs, which saw performances from Dame Shirley Bassey, Katherine Jenkins, Il DIvo and Russell Watson, with the London Chamber Orchestra. ‘The use of the XL8 on last year’s show proved how much better it sounded on classical material than previous consoles,’ he says. ‘The challenge this year of switching quickly between 42 radio mic vocal inputs, plus live symphony orchestra for the Les Miserables performance to orchestra, plus live and recorded instrument tracks for other performances, was achieved using the XL8’s input busing system.’

Read more on the FOH loudspeaker set-up.

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