The ongoing concert tour by popular country artist Dylan Scott, who is celebrating the seventh anniversary of his first number one hit on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, 2016’s “My Girl” on Nashville’s Curb Records, is traveling with a pair of compact DiGiCo SD9 consoles for front-of-house and monitors sharing an SD-Rack on an Optocore fiber loop supplied by Clair Global.
Logistics are an important consideration for the tour, which is traveling with a standard trailer that includes five set carts with video wall and lighting; an 8×6-foot drum riser with drums that stay built and wired, ready to be plugged in; a multipurpose rack that houses wireless transmitters and receivers, tracks playback, video playback, bass DI, and other gear; plus all of the usual guitars, pedal boards, and keyboards in their flight cases for the band.
“Sure, we‘d all love to have the gear in an air-ride semi-truck instead of banging around in a trailer, but this is our reality of the road for now,” says Jason Bjerg, Scott’s production manager and monitor engineer. “We literally designed this tour around the trailer — what we could fit into it that would let us put on as big a production as possible without sacrificing any quality, and knowing the trailer had to be packed exactly the same way every night. The DiGiCo SD9 desks were the perfect choice; they’ve got a very compact footprint but still give us everything we need for fantastic sound.”
Bjerg got to know the SD9 on some religious mission shows in Africa where, he says, the environment was challenging: “If you could have seen the dirt and dust that accumulated on those consoles there, you’d wonder how they ever worked. But, every show, they came out sounding like they were right out of the box. They never missed a beat.”
Brayden Dana, who mixes front-of-house for Scott, had been a user of the larger SD12 and he also migrated to the SD9 for this tour. “Other than the smaller footprint and one less screen, there are no changes I had to make to adjust,” he says, noting that he added his own outboard second screen. “I just loaded in my show file and it was ready to go — plug and play.”
He adds that the smaller form factor means that he can set up in more places in a venue, added flexibility that can come in handy when you’re second or third on the bill at a show, as well as having load in and out go faster. “We don’t need to rock and tip the desk; just lift it up on top of the one rack I’m using,” he says. “And it’s the same workflow I’m used to from the SD12, or from any DiGiCo desk, really.” Dana uses Waves plugins on the SD9 but notes that the onboard processing is as good as anything out there. “It’s just one more way we’re able to keep the equipment compact and use the trailer space for production,” he says.
