Having recruited 40,000 online subscribers and notched up 2.5m YouTube views, multi-instrumentalist and looping maestro Jacob Collier took his own style of jazz to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London and at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland for live performances.
Using several looping stations and having a number of open microphones can be present some unusual mixing challenges, but FOH engineer Ben Bloomberg reckoned to have everything in hand with DiGiCo consoles at both events. ‘The speed and flexibility is amazing,’ he says. ‘Having Flexi Channels that can easily switch between mono or stereo, the speed at which you can patch the desk, assign control groups, change the buss configuration, set up virtual soundcheck, even change the sample rate of several DSP cores and consoles – all of that is just incredibly easy and can be done in the moment, even during a rehearsal. With other systems, you’d be sending the artists and crew on a break…’
At Ronnie Scott’s, Bloomberg used the smaller footprint of the SD10 – not only did it fit inside the small FOH booth at the club, but he knew he could easily move to the larger SD7 used at Montreux. ‘We’re running Ableton Live, which is very unusual for a jazz show,’ he says. ‘There are six looping systems, all sequenced so that when Jacob walks up to a set of microphones, they are ready to record him. It’s not often that one comes across bars of 11/4 or loops of seven on top of two in an Ableton set – working with Jacob is incredibly rewarding because he’s such an amazing talent and demands a lot of the audio systems and of the mixing engineer. He runs around the stage, playing instruments, and the computer knows where he is at any given time. Audio is sent to the desk via Madi using a MOTU 112D AVB interface. Together, the MOTU and DiGiCo console enable live manipulation of 32 audio paths to the six loopers with different lengths and configuration, all simultaneously.’
It’s not enough for Collier’s fascinating rhythms to be in time. Sound quality is equally important to Bloomberg: ‘[The consoles] can run Waves but we don’t need to, because the built-in effects sound so good. We’re using everything; the muti-band EQ and dynamics, DiGiTuBe on the bass DI everything is in the console. It’s been a pleasure to work on this desk.’
Since starting MIT in 2007, Bloomberg has worked for composer and Professor Tod Machover at the MIT Media Lab, touring internationally to design and support technology for his productions. ‘I’ve used just about every console at this point, but lately we see DiGiCo everywhere,’ he adds.
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