The recent “Lonesome Crowded West Tour” of North America by indie rock band Modest Mouse, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the album of the same name, saw front of house engineer Peter Thompson delivering mixes via a Soundcraft Vi7000 console.
“Modest Mouse was a seven-piece during my first run with them last summer,” says Thompson. “This Lonesome Crowded West tour was a four piece and all guitar amps, no digital profilers or anything, so the whole setup was very analog. With that, the only challenge was battling the ambience of the stage, getting the guitars to project and still have room for vocals. I’ve been using Vi consoles for a long time, since 2007 or so, and I’ve used them with Steely Dan and Bob Seger and several other old-school acts using amps and monitors. So I took it to the front-of-house for this tour because it’s my go-to desk.”
The Vi7000 is equipped with up to 128 inputs, 32 mono/stereo buses and 96 kHz 40-bit floating point digital processing. The onboard Vistronics hybrid interface is designed to combines features of analog hardware and digital software for streamlined controls and added versatility. The interface places rotary knobs and switches directly onto a touchscreen that displays output monitoring, EQ, sends and more. Depending on the software being used, the graphics behind the analog controls will change to the relevant controls.
“The Vi7000 addressed how I like to work,” explains Thompson. “I’ve done several different kinds of things with the Vi setup and it is so easy, simple and fast. The biggest plus is that it’s very quick to navigate. Like when I needed to do quick panning and whatnot for certain songs, I program the pan knob to be right there in front of the faders. The ergonomics of the desk is really nice—and it’s not that I don’t use other desks as well, but I still keep coming back to the Vi.”
In addition to the Vi7000, a Soundcraft Vi Stagebox provided Thompson with an extra 64 mic/line inputs and 32 analog line outputs for even greater flexibility and routing options. He also utilized a Soundcraft Realtime Rack Core for access to effects and plugins by Universal Audio.
“The Realtime Rack is basically integrated into the Vi system, which is great,” Thompson adds. “I used it for the Lexicon reverb and some simple compression on the vocals, but I didn’t use a heck of a lot of it in this particular run. I used the Realtime Rack a lot with the regular Modest Mouse tour, though, because Isaac would have distortion effects and things like that that aren’t built into the Vi. But for the most part, all the parameters like comps, gates and EQ work to the point where I often don’t need additional plugins. Everything I need is already built into the desk.”
