FOH engineer and API Rising Star Giles Stocks has been using Allen & Heath’s GLD-112 desk to mix a variety of artists at gigs across Europe lately.

A number of big-name bands have been relying on Stocks and his GLD system recently, including Pulled Apart By Horses at Leeds First Direct Arena, Zico Chain at London’s O2 Arena and Hawk Eyes, who have been supporting System Of A Down throughout the group’s tour of Europe.

The GLD-112 is a larger version of the GLD-80 mixer from Allen & Heath, featuring eight additional control strips, which takes the channel count to 28 fader strips in four layers. The console offers 48 input processing channels, along with eight stereo FX returns, 30 configurable busses and 20 mix processing channels.

“It’s by far the best-sounding console in its price range, it’s a very dynamic board and the CPU is fantastically quick," Stocks said. "The whole desk can be mapped out anyway you choose, giving lots of choice as to how to mix a show. In addition, there’s a huge selection of very high quality effects on-board, all outputs have full parametric EQ – and compression with parallel and filtering options. It’s incredibly flexible and sounds great.

“With Zico Chain and Hawk Eyes, we wanted to record the shows for reference and release, so we ran the GLD-112’s Dante card straight into my laptop via Ethernet, which provided a very safe and easy to set up recording system. The desk’s small footprint also makes it easy to get the console, Cat5 and stage box in and out of venues really quickly.

“I was a fan of the original GLD-80, but the GLD-112’s extra bank of channels on each layer means I can spend more time doing an active mix of a show because I’m not navigating through layers of FX, DCAs and Groups – so it’s a very creative tool.”

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