Foo Fighters play a well-rounded gig with DiGiCo

News

Andrew Low Jul 18 2008, 11:00am

The band returned to London’s Wembley stadium this June with two D5s at FOH

Following up their successful UK arena tour in November, Dave Grohl and company hit Wembley for two sold-out shows at Wembley stadium this June.

The band’s FOH engineer, Bryan Worthen used a pair of D5s to handle FOH with the second board used for redundancy for the main console. Due to the size of the arena they were not able to use the dual stage set they had in November.

“Everything was done from the one stage at Wembley because, with the size of the venue, the problems with delay from B stage would have been horrendous,” says Bryan. “So at those shows I ran the second console in mirror mode as a backup.”

Despite the single stage setup, Worthen still had to deal with slapback from the in the round configuration.

“The new stadium has a horrendous echo, much worse than the old one,” says Bryan. “We were stereo imaging all the way round, so I had PA pointing in all directions. Like any football stadium it’s basically a rectangle and so the echo was coming back at different times from the ‘short’ and ‘long’ sides to the band on stage.

“Not too many buildings give us a hard time, but this was certainly a challenge."

This was the last time Worthen used the D5 as he will soon switch over to the company’s new SD7 for future tours.

“The guys at DiGiCo went through the whole thing [the SD7] with us and I fell in love with it,” said Worthen.

“There are many things I like about it. For me, the visual side is a big improvement - the bigger screens, the way it’s laid out and how the EQ knobs and selectable controls light up in different colours makes it easier for me to identify the control for the parameter I’m adjusting.”

“The EQ is a lot more precise and looks a lot better, while the channel and processing compression sounds a lot better.

“To be honest, I will only really be able to gauge what it sounds like in a show environment, so I haven’t really had the chance to hear it properly yet, but everybody I know who has used it on shows - for example Madonna’s FOH engineer Tim Colvard - claims that it sounds even better than the D5.”
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