Digico SD10 a ’solid’ choice for Vance Joy tour

Riptide singer Vance Joy’s monitor engineer has deployed a Digico SD10 for his current stadium tour, supplied by British rental company Encore PA.

Monitor engineer Mani Hammond has been working with Joy since 2014. He started his career on analogue desks, but when he made the move to a digital Digico SD9, he found the transition “an easy one”.

“I like having lots of faders as I don’t like changing banks,” he said “Having 32 faders in front of you makes everything easily accessible.”

Hammond is running 12 channels of in-ears and is using the onboard reverbs and just a few Waves plugins. He has up to 52 channels of inputs including drums, bass, acoustic and electric guitar, keys, and a horns section, with the inclusion of a B stage increasing the channel count slightly.

“We are carrying most of the PA throughout the tour and we’ve managed to take the control package everywhere with us, which has given us great consistency and, because we’re running on Optocore now, we also have total redundancy,” he commented. “It has been very solid, and the sound quality is fantastic.”

As Joy uses several acoustic guitars and ukuleles, being able to re-call EQ pre-sets has been “really useful”.

“The sound of the guitars changes according to how well-used its strings are, as well as the temperature and humidity of the room, so I have a bunch of EQs set up for various situations,” he continued. “Also, Vance’s guitar playing can go from delicate finger picking to strumming pretty hard very quickly throughout the set. It’s really dynamic, so the Dynamic EQ and Dynamic Comps have been extremely useful in getting these peaks under control.”

Mani is also making use of a DiGiGrid MGB interface to record the show onto his laptop using the input switch function, which allows him to do virtual soundchecks.

“Again, because the acoustic guitars can change so dramatically with all the temperature and dynamic variables, it’s been hugely useful to being able to change settings on the SD10 via virtual soundchecks without needing Vance on stage any longer than he needs to be,” Hammond concluded.