Taking the studio duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser on the road as a six-piece band, New York psychedelic rockers MGMT are on the road in Europe in support of their current album release. At monitors for the past seven months, Fabian Quiroga is back behind his preferred mixing desk: ‘After doing a few small tours with the band’s previous console, I knew I had to go back to my DiGiCo SD8,’ he says.
‘When I came into this camp, management wanted the transition of a new monitor engineer to be as smooth as possible and they asked if I could use the former board. But for the European leg of the tour, I’ve gotten my SD8 back with me and it has already made a huge difference. Mixing monitors on a SD console is so easy and enjoyable.
‘With this band, I have to be quite heavy with snapshots since there are so many electronic and acoustic elements, and each of the six the guys play different instruments all through the set,’ he adds.
MGMT’s VanWyngarden handles vocals, guitar, keyboards and a 70lb cowbell Co-frontman Goldwasser does double duty on keyboards, samplers and effects. Both are complimented by guitar, bass, drums and another player on guitar and keyboardsm as well as support vocals from most of the band.
‘I believe we have a total of 46 inputs not including my stage talkbacks,’ Quiroga says. ‘The whole band is on IEMs with the new Ultimate Ears UE Personal Reference Monitors and Sennheiser G3 belt packs, with the exception of the bass player, who is on a d&b audiotechnik M2 system (sometimes two if the stage space allows it). I also give the drummer a d&b Q-sub to give him a little more feel.’
Heavily reliant on snapshots and having used an Avid console on this most recent two tours, Quiroga was initially nervous about making the change: ‘but after getting back on my SD8, it was like riding a bike… a very powerful, modern and awesome bike,’ he says. ‘ I love that I could make global changes just by choosing the parameters I wanted the changes to ripple to. I always try to be very minimal when it comes to my monitor mixing; I tend to stay away from plug-ins, unless the band and the gig really require it. I have been in too many cases where the show was held off and sometimes stopped due to the use of outside plug-ins.’
‘I use a designated reverb for each of their vocals and a couple room verbs for the drums in order to recreate the room we are playing at in their ears. I also use a couple delays for a keyboard in order to recreate the effect used on the lead synth for the song ‘Kids’ from the first album. As I said before, I try to be very minimal when it comes to effects – I rely heavily on my onboard effects and my audience mics positioning in order to recreate the room.’
The SD8’s Macros are also important: ‘I use them anywhere, from mute groups for my inputs and outs, delay tap tempo, or simply to bring up my spill groups with the different copies of the channels I have designated to each member of the band.
‘This is the smallest tour I have done in my life and I love it. And I’m blessed to have Steve Revitte as my counterpart at FOH. Although I don’t have an A2 for this gig, my load-outs take about 30 minutes tops and carrying all ears makes it that much easy.
‘I’m so happy to be back on my SD8,’ he sums up. ‘I explain it to everyone of what bringing an DiGiCo on tour is like in this way – there are a lot of cars that could take you from Point A to Point B, and that is OK. But once you get used to driving a Ferrari, it’s tough to go behind the wheel of anything less powerful. Yeah, the car is nice and cheap on gas, but it’s nothing like being behind the wheel of a Ferrari. The DiGiCo is fast like a Ferrari, but also has the reliability of a Prius.’
More: www.digico.org
