EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ and MANCHESTER, TN — Eighth Day Sound faced back-to-back production responsibilities for two major events, the Hot 97 Summer Jam at Giants Stadium and the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, using four DiGiCo SD8 consoles for the d&b audiotechnik PA system. “We wanted to offer a console that would fit the same budget, but would also provide a sonic upgrade,” said Owen Orzack, Eighth Day’s director of touring operations, noting the sonics, reliability and ease of use for the guest engineers. “Also, real estate is at a premium at these kinds of festivals, and the SD8 offered a small footprint in an all-in-one package. Plus, we were able to keep everything in the digital realm—from a digital AES signal out, into a Dolby digital link EQ, all the way down to the amplifiers.”
The Hot 97 Summer Jam lineup included Mary J. Blige, Jadakiss, T-Pain, Young Jeezy and Elephant Man. At Bonnaroo, which drew thousands to multiple stages for a four-day span, Eighth Day handled the main music stage and some of the secondary stages, mixing sound for a diverse lineup that included Erikah Badu, Wailing Souls, Snoop Dogg, Galactic, The Itals, and Rodrigo Y Gabriella.
The two sets of DiGiCo SD8 consoles included two at FOH and two on monitors for both the Hot 97 event and for Bonnaroo’s main stage.
Eighth Day was also able to do some standard input pre-programming prior to the events, enabling the guest engineers to have a head start before their set. Also, having both consoles in tandem onsite allowed for one act to perform downstage using one SD8, while the subsequent band line-checked on the other.
At Hot 97, the input list typically ranged from 12 to 20 for the hip-hop headliners (with the exception of Mary J. Blige, who used 48 channels of the 120 inputs available with the SD8). Bonnaroo’s full-band roster averaged between 24 and 36 inputs.
Having two sets of consoles came in handy, Orzack recalled, especially when things changed, “which is inevitable on these kinds of events,” he said. “At Hot 97, they changed the schedule at the last minute, and we were able to very easily transfer the data on a USB plug from the ‘red’ console to the ‘green’ console without any problem or wasted time.”
Chris Berry, Eighth Day staffer and FOH engineer, credited the SD8 for its sonic transparency. “It’s amazing. I can hear every instrument on stage in the mix. There is no need to EQ out the sound of the preamp, which has headroom for days — even when living in clip you hear no distortion.
“For these kinds of events,” Berry added, “one of my favorite features is the macro section.” He cited the ability to manipulate the screen, change console options and ability to turn the touch sense fader on and off and assign it to a macro for ease of use.
“The ability to lock the rotary encoders on a per-bank basis — being able to lock a specific aux send in place so that the drum bank had the drum verb send, the vocal bank had the vocal verb locked in — was a new find for me,” Berry added. “And being able to lock the gain to the top encoder on the mix faders, made the ‘throw-and-go’ acts easier to set up.”
Berry said he was also impressed when engineers who had never worked on a DiGiCo, let alone an SD series—walked up and with very few instructions and run through their shows with very little stress. “There is always the occasional question here and there, but for the most part, they just got down to work, and were happy with the result.”
“Working on the SD8 was a great experience,” said Kyle T. Hamilton, FOH engineer with Mary J Blige, “since I had never worked on the console before. I’ve used the D5, so my knowledge of that desk helped me get around. Since it was a festival, I really did not get to stretch out on the console — use the FX package, or internal comps, I just used what were in the FX racks…I will say that the console sounds great.”
“We polled everyone who stood behind the desk,” Orzack said, “and the thing that they all said was how much better it sounded than your standard festival-fare console. It was evident that the acts mixed on the SD8 sounded better than those who carried in their own production packages. We heard that from more than one set of folks.”
Managing all the monitor duties for both events was Eighth Day’s Ed Ehrbar, who found the ‘select all’ functionality on the desk handy. “It’s a great thing to be able to set all of your compressors, EQ, high-pass filters, whatever, on one fader bank just by touching one thing on the screen. That saves a lot of time, especially when you’re doing drums. It’s laid out very well and sounds incredible—as is the SD7—with tons of headroom.
“When I’m not doing these events, I mostly mix monitors for Tom Jones,” Ehrbar added. “For the next tour, I’m looking forward to moving over to an SD8. His entire band is on in-ears, but I have to run some in mono and some in stereo because we don’t have enough outputs on our current console for everyone to be stereo. But with the DiGiCo, because it gets 24 stereo outputs, it will be a refreshing change.”
Eighth Day has plans for a busy summer, with the Lollapalooza Music Fest in Chicago in early August following the All Points West Music & Arts Festival in New Jersey. In October, Eighth Day will support the Austin City Music Festival in Texas.
For more information, please visit www.digico.org and www.8thdaysound.com.
