Overview

 

When sound engineer Wayne ‘Rabbit’ Sargeant first set eyes on a digital console, he admits that his initial reaction was fear. The incident took place in the USA, as he was preparing for a tour with Snow Patrol in his capacity as the band’s monitor engineer.

“It didn’t last long. By the end of the first session I was saying ’I want one’,” Rabbit grins.

The console in question was Yamaha’s flagship PM1D and, ever since, Rabbit has been a confirmed fan and a regular user of its sibling, the PM5D.

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Mixers:

PM1D, PM5D

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Positive First Impression Lead to a Beautiful Relationship

“Like most engineers who have come from working with analog consoles, the transition was mostly a change of thought process,” Rabbit continues. “I’d say the worst part is getting over that irrational fear factor. Once you start using digital consoles it’s very straightforward and you rapidly begin to appreciate the amazingly creative possibilities that open up.”

Rabbit chose Yamaha consoles because those vital first impressions were very positive. “Firstly, the layout looked very easy cope with, but also the operating system had been around for some time,” he says. “In my experience it’s very stable and reliable. It’s not based on Windows and I’m absolutely confident that it’s not going to let me down – which is incredibly important for a touring engineer.”

Worldwide Consistency

Although originally doing monitors for Snow Patrol, Rabbit is a front of house engineer by trade. Switching to the band’s FOH position, he requested a PM5D as his console of choice when the band set off on a world tour.

“A great advantage was that it provided worldwide consistency. Wherever I was in the world, support was very easily accessible,” he says. “And in some countries – Korea is an example – the main Yamaha representatives in that country came down and checked that everything was OK and that I was happy. They were incredibly helpful.”

A key benefit was that Yamaha’s global network also ensures that the PM5D is available in many countries, which saved the Snow Patrol organization the costs of having to tour with their own console. All Rabbit had to do was load his saved settings into the locally sourced desk and he was ready to go.

“The desk is very easy to hire locally,” he says. “You can just load everything up and go. It’s so much easier than what I had to do with analog consoles. I used to take photos of the desks so I could recreate the settings and all sorts. Now I load the show and there’s only a bit of EQ and the system to worry about.”

“Once you set up all user defined keys it works really well,” he continues. “The onboard effects are also excellent, it’s got a really good sounding reverb and it saves so much space not having to carry around racks of outboard. These days the only outboard I ever use is an Avalon channel strip on the lead vocal. All the other effects are in the PM5D.”

Easy Tie-in with Any System

There are times, of course, when an engineer is thrown into a situation where being able to us his ‘own’ desk is very important but not always possible. Festivals are a prime example, where bands and their crews often have to use whatever is provided. This is a real problem in the digital domain, where there is no single protocol for fiber optic multicores – Desk A won’t necessarily work with a multicore designed for Desk B.

With the PM5D, however, this is not a problem. You can use the XLR headers for any other console, meaning that the PM5D can successfully be tied in to any system.

“The footprint of the console is so small that it’s easy to take your own PM5D along,” says Rabbit. “You can tie into existing systems really easily without getting another multicore run. It’s very straightforward and really comes into its own in festivals. Even when you’re working overseas and the language barrier might make it very hard to explain the intricacies of digital audio, this facility on the PM5D makes it really easy.”

The Key to Creativity

But it’s when he can start getting creative that Rabbit is happiest. Because digital consoles allow sound engineers to do things that would be extraordinarily time consuming – and in many cases impossible – with analog desks.

“You can always forget things on an analog board, so being able to save scenes and instantly recall them with different configurations and effects is beginning to really change the face of live sound,” he says. “Front of House sound is now, in particular, starting to see the boundaries blurred between live and studio production. You can get a produced sound instead of a standard ‘just make it louder’ mix.”

He continues: “For example, live you can now take one guitar input and, using the internal routing, bounce it on to ten channels, adding different effects and really building up layers of sound. At a gig the drums don’t need to just have one sound any more. You can get really creative, save the settings as a scene and instantly recall it at any time. So the sound for one song can be totally different to any other. With analog that sort of thing would be really time consuming and you couldn’t recall settings on the fly.

“Digital audio opens up so many possibilities. It means that you can have a recording studio on stage in real time. It’s really exciting. And with the PM5D it’s really intuitive!”

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