Taking a final, farewell trip around the highways of their UK roots, the Average White Band’s Let’s Go Round Again (One Last Time) tour took them from Manchester to Scotland via the Royal Albert Hall in a celebration of the power of these Scottish soul and R&B giants. At front of house, Charlie Dale chose to tour with a DiGiCo SD10 while Mark Gazaille on monitors opted for the SD12.
Dale has been with the band since meeting them at his day job, mixing sound at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. The band had arrived without an engineer, so he stepped in, beginning a relationship that would continue for more than 15 years. Although this tour was almost exclusively theatres and intimate venues, Dale chose the SD10 in order could keep his entire mix on one surface.
‘It’s nice having a DiGiCo with me, partly because I know the console backwards but also because of the processing,’ he says. ‘It allows me to quite subtly mix, in a way I wouldn’t be able to do with other consoles – like using a little bit of dynamic EQ where it’s needed rather than hacking an EQ to make something sound good. We were travelling to a variety of venues from theatres to clubs, so having all those all those tools built into the console is great.’
When touring venues of different sizes, the consistency of the DiGiCo SD10 ensures every performance goes smoothly. On a paired back tour with a limited crew, it is important for the engineers to know their desks inside out and having consoles that they can use without thinking is a significant advantage.
The Average White Band set-up is old school – there is no track or time code, just a really tight band. Having the experience of mixing this iconic group and enjoying such a strong relationship has been a fantastic experience.
‘It’s just seven guys playing amazing soul music,’Dale remarks. ‘In a world where so much of what we mix is heavily programmed and the songs are a set length because it’s all to time code, it’s really lovely to go back to that feeling of, “I’m mixing all of this”. Being with the band in the Albert Hall was phenomenal. Throughout the tour, we’ve done some lovely theatres, festivals and also tiny venues. The set-up is quite simple, we don’t take much with us, but it’s a joy in every space.’
Touring with the SD10 means that Dale is not carrying a rack of outboard, just a single favoured reverb. On stage with the SD12, are four monitor wedges and four IEM mixes. Keeping it simple means the stage sound is lower, so in venues with less-than-perfect acoustics Dale and Gazaille can avoid putting too much energy into the room.
While not all his gigs are this paired back, using the SD10 can feel like having a whole warehouse team and equipment at your disposal, as he says. ‘I have other bands where I am using all the bells and whistles. Snapshots are really powerful in those situations, Recently, for the Rewind Festival in Dublin, we had a single house band that stayed on for the whole show. Throughout the evening, we had rapid changeovers between numbers and snapshots were really useful. It’s great to have the power of the console in those situations to keep it all rolling. Another major thing about DiGiCo is the tech support. I haven’t needed it on this tour, but I did need it for Rewind and having someone at the end of the phone who can help you out straight away is phenomenal.’
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