Country artist Josh Turner is currently touring the U.S. and Canada, with front of house engineer Jerry Slone utilizing a Harman Soundcraft Vi3000 console and Realtime Rack supplied by Digital Console Rental of Nashville.
Slone discovered the Vi3000 in February during rehearsals for Turner’s spring tour. “I went to [Digital Console Rental’s owner] Howard Jones’ warehouse and checked it out,” Slone says. “We decided to use it alongside our existing console during rehearsals.
“The first couple of days,” he continues, “I poked around the desk, built a mix and got familiar with it. DCR operations manager Chris Wilhelm was a huge help in me getting acquainted with the new mixing format. By the fourth day, I had completely powered off the previous console and I haven’t used it since.”
Slone points to the Vi3000’s ease of use and intuitive operation as key advantages. “My trouble in the beginning was when I needed to find something, I expected I would need to click a mouse and dig through a bunch of menus, as is the case with other consoles,” he notes, also citing sonic quality: “The sound quality is extremely analog in nature. The Vi3000 has all the advantages of digital, but has a very analog vibe to it.”
The Realtime Rack provides Slone use of Universal Audio plug-ins within the Soundcraft platform. “Realtime Rack has been phenomenal, I’ve been using it on drums, bass, Josh’s vocal, steel and slide guitars, and fiddle,” he says. “The gear required for the same analog effects equipment would be massive and the plug-ins sound terrific. That’s not to knock the onboard processing. I’m using a fair amount of the onboard compressors and gates in conjunction with the Realtime Rack plug-ins. Also the onboard Lexicon effects processors are fantastic.”
