ProSoundWeb: I recently did a very compact gig with one of my regular bands that usually plays the largest format shows. This wasn’t going from 40 production semi-trailers to four, as we have for festivals in the past, where I can keep the same control package – this was scaling down to a small van carrying eight flight-cases for an exclusive performance in a small space. There was a limited footprint for my equipment, and my usual set-up was neither appropriate nor necessary.
2 comments:
I've actually recently become a fan of smaller console formats myself. I've never really understood the need to have more than like 25 channels visible on mixer at once. Because really there isn't a world where you would need to see that many at once, or you could even watch at once. While I understand that large scale productions might have a lot more going on. Theres no real chance that any audio mixer can be watching all of those channels at once, and either way you can organize your system into pages any way most of the time today. So what gives? Why have a bigger mixer when you really don't need it. I think today that a lot of designers tend to think that bigger mixers = better, and I'm really confused by the mentality. I hope that more see the practically of having something smaller and more comfortable to work on soon.
This article made me think about what does it mean to have a high quality console, and is that necessarily tied to size. In both the sound and lighting worlds, I generally associate that the larger a console the higher end of a product it is. I am thinking about ETC’s flagship lighting console, the Apex 20, and MA’s flagship, the MA3 full size. These are both massive consoles which require many people to carry, and take up enormous amounts of desk space. As a technician who has had to move these consoles, it is a pain, and has a significant cost. In a large venue with a long tech time, these large format consoles can absolutely be helpful and allow the programmer to have more control over their rig. However, there are plenty of small, high-end gigs that still want high quality control, but physically do not have the space for a large console. I think it is interesting to think about what options the manufacturers have in these brackets, of small form factor but high end consoles.
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