Midas takes centre stage at Glastonbury

A number of Midas digital consoles were once again used across this year’s Glastonbury festival.

RG Jones supplied XL4s with an XL88 matrix mixer for the Pyramid Stage, which were used by such artists as BB King, Wu-Tang Clan and Plan B. Several other acts also brought their own Midas desks with them to the Pyramid Stage, including Biffy Clyro, Paolo Nutini, Morrissey and Pendulum.

On the Other Stage, Skan was using its familiar formula of two XL4s at FoH and two H3000s on stage. A South West Audio PRO6 was used at FoH at the Park Stage, where Pulp and Radiohead made guest appearances. Pulp’s engineer, Matt Butcher, was so impressed during production rehearsals that he and the band have since exchanged their usual digital console for a PRO6 for the rest of their summer schedule. He commented: “We did an A/B test in rehearsals and the PRO6 sounded so much better: bigger and wider and cleaner than the other one,” says Butcher. “The difference in sound was immediately apparent to me, and Jarvis noticed too, so we ended up swapping consoles.”

Marcus Dalmeida and Jerey Denning were running FoH for South West Audio at The Park. “We ran a system of writing patches in the offline editor in real time at FOH, updating as the bands arrived, which enabled us to configure the desk for the incoming guest engineers,” said Dalmeida. “This made their time much more relaxed as the desk was configured to their patch list, and VCA and POP(ulation) Groups were preconfigured for them. We had a mixture of top touring engineers, together with Midas PRO6 virgins, some of whom were a little apprehensive about walking into a festival situation with an unfamiliar digital desk, but after a two minute tour of the desk they realised how simple the control surface was, and there were some really impressive mixes.

“We had many glowing comments, such as, ‘Wow this system sounds so good’, and ‘it was a real pleasure mixing on such a precise desk’, and the engineers were delighted at how easy it was to use.

“Jerey and myself had a very enjoyable time and were proud of the sound quality on our stage; the desk has a very tactile feel to it which is very similar to Midas analogue. In our humble opinion it’s the best digital desk in the world.”

The BBC Introducing Stage saw a PRO9 at FoH, which was handled by Arron Sayers, also from the South West Group. “Despite the rain and muddy conditions this year, the Midas PRO9 performed beautifully and made the festival that little bit more enjoyable, “ said Sayers. “Both myself and the guest engineers enjoyed working on the console. After a two minute explanation of where its features could be found, even those who had never used the PRO range found ‘mixing on the fly’ intuitive and easy.”