One of India’s best loved artists, Diljit Dosanjh, paid a visit to the UK earlier this year, playing sell out arena shows in Birmingham, London and Leeds. His Front of House engineer, Fali Damania, chose a DiGiCo SD5 to mix the shows, provided by audio rental company, Delta, a choice that was duplicated at the monitor position.
“We specify either an SD10 or SD5 for Diljit’s shows,” he says. “I find the layout of both to be extremely functional and the workflow of all DiGiCo consoles makes any show, large or small, a breeze to set up and execute. In this instance, the show isn’t so big; we’re running about 48 inputs at FOH and the monitor console has around 16 Stereo Mixes.”
The system included two SD-Racks and both consoles are running 96Khz sampling rate, providing the best experience for the artist, the musicians and audience.
“The functionality and sonic quality of the SD5 are top notch,” says Fali. “I like to think of the console surface as a blank slate. You can set it up any way you wish and change fader/bank assignments on the fly. And sonically the console is brilliant.”
Fali handles all processing EQ and dynamics on the console itself and doesn’t findthe need for any external effects.
“I run Snapshots for all the songs, mostly EQ changes, bringing up solo instruments and pans on backing vocals,” he adds. “We didn’t have much prep time for this run of shows, so I made Snapshots on the fly during the first show, multitrack recorded the first show, and fine-tuned the snapshots before the second show”
Fali reports that the consoles were perfect throughout the tour and that the team and Mr. Dosanjh himself were very happy with the results.
