Following a summer of festivals in 2012, Scottish singer/songwriter Amy Macdonald has undertaken a European tour to promote her album Life In A Beautiful Light. At FOH, her engineer Fabrizio Piazzini is mixing the shows on a DiGiCo SD8.

Piazzini uses 53 inputs for the shows, feeding a basic left/right mix. While Macdonald’s guitar and vocals are the obvious focus, he also has to bring out the dynamics of her album recordings.

‘The SD8 is a very clear, crisp, natural sounding console – the preamps are very clean and it doesn’t colour the sound at all,’ he says. ‘It’s also a very sexy surface – it just feels right.

An established DiGiCo user, Piazzini cut his teeth on the original D1 console not long after the company was founded.

‘I want people to see and hear Amy, but without her being overpowering,’ he says. ‘The production on the albums is very clever, there are lots of little melodies coming from different instruments – one second the piano has a really interesting melody, the next second the bass does a cool line, then a Hammond organ comes in, then a guitar… It’s very dynamic. I have a Snapshot per song, but I am riding the faders throughout the show.

‘The multi-input channels and the dynamic EQ that you can dial in as and where you want are great,’ continues. ‘I also like the fact that it’s all on Madi, which makes it very fast and easy to do virtual soundchecks. Literally one button click allows me to tune the room with the show file, rather than with some well recorded music from the 1970s or whatever.’

Amy Macdonald’s shows includes an acoustic interlude, for which Piazzini has found the Set Spill feature – in the SD8’s latest Overdrive 2 software – exceptionally useful: ‘Set Spill is a great feature,’ he confirms. ‘For the acoustic segment, I can dial up all the faders of the channels being used in those four songs, rather than having the whole lot, so I can re-populate the surface as I want it,’ he notes.

The desk’s Waves SoundGrid integration is also put to good use: ‘I do the drum bussing and compressing using the Waves SSL G-Master Buss compressor, the phase plug-in for the kick and snare and multi-band Waves TransX modulation for the toms, which keeps them prominent without being too loud,’ he says. ‘The Abbey Road Redd Consoles plug-in gives the bass a huge sound, which is amazing, and I also use transit modulation on the acoustic guitar. For the vocal I use the C6 multi-band compressor and the Waves Aphex Vintage Aural Exciter.

‘These are all tools which I could not afford to take the hardware versions of on tour, but with the Waves integration I can,’ he continues. ‘Being able to use effects out on tour that everyone knows in the studio is fantastic. It’s just a matter of choosing what tools I need for that day, loading the file and I’m done. And access to all of them is on the console’s surface.

‘Waves with DiGiCo perfectly complements the consoles, because the whole chain is super high quality. DiGiCo consoles sound good and the Waves plugins make a show sound better. The combination is of a really, really high standard and has revolutionised the way I work on tour.’

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