Monitor engineer for Alicia Keys and American rock band Alter Bridge, Antonio Luna is a regular DiGiCo SD10 console user and has lately begun using Waves’ SoundGrid networking/processing platform through the DiGiGrid MGB interface.
‘I’d wanted a recording rig for some time as virtual soundchecks are really useful for a monitor engineer, but the cost of the gear to do that had always been prohibitive,’ he says. ‘The DiGiGrid MGB is a solution that means you just need one black box and a laptop to capture and playback audio on your console at a cost that’s really affordable.’
His revised set-up connects his DiGiCo SD-Rack via DiGiGrid MGB over Ethernet to a MacBook Pro running Reaper. Recordings are made to a an internal SSD drive. The recorder allows him to record up to 128 tracks of audio from the SD10 at 48k, or 64 tracks at 96k.
Luna was one of the first people to put the MGB interface into use: ‘Everything about it is great,’ he says. ‘From the packaging – it’s surrounded by non-compressible foam, which is important for me as I travel a lot – to the fact that it has 6ft of Ethernet cable and a universal DC power wall-wart style PSU that has a world plug adapter set and a threaded rotating collar. The little things go a long way and losing power to a pulled plug is something you don’t want to worry about.
Within a couple of hours of receiving it, he had set up his MacBook Pro and installed the software he needed: ‘As chance would have it, our tour needed to solve some problems,’ he recalls. ‘We were on the last leg and it was a big one – 22 flights in five weeks that would take us to 17 cities in the Middle East, Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. We record all our shows, and part of our spec is a Pro Tools rig at FOH to archive. The local provider couldn’t get a recording rig for FOH for one of the shows, so DiGiGrid got its first workout.’
He was also able to fit the SD10 console, SD-Rack, RF rack and cables onto a single airfreight pallet that shipped with the grand piano and backline: ‘This meant we could use DiGiGrid and my laptop as the recording rig for the show,’ he continues. ‘Both DiGiCo and the Reaper software I’d bought have a matrix patch bay, so you can determine what channels in the signal path you want routed to specific SoundGrid channels. This allowed me to pick up just the channels I wanted, leaving channels like talkback mics behind.’
The show went without a hitch and Luna had set up the Performance Meter in Reaper to evaluate the performance of the laptop: ‘I was impressed,’ he reports. ‘Total CPU usage was just 22 per cent max and the file size for 54 inputs was just under 100Gb, which meant I could safely record two shows before moving them to storage. And you’re not limited to using just one DiGiGrid; if you have more than one rack, you can use a second DiGiGrid to get higher track counts; using DiGiGrid SWI, a certified SoundGrid five-port Ethernet switch, will allow you to connect two devices to your DAW. DiGiGrid’s integration with my console was seamless. And it isn’t just for DiGiCo users; any console with a Madi connection can use this device to record.
‘Thank you Matt Larson at Group One Ltd [DiGiGo’s US distributor] for keeping me in the loop on new developments,’ he adds. ‘The ability to record using DiGiGrid is simply amazing.’
More: www.digigrid.net
