After a 28-year career, Norwegian trio A-ha have decided to split, saying farewell to their fans with a major world tour, which is being supported by two DiGiCo consoles plus a full complement of Sennheiser microphones and in-ear monitoring systems.
Taking in Asia, Europe, North and South America, the tour finished on home ground in December with four sold-out dates at the Oslo Spektrum. Having used a DiGiCo SD7 on the band’s previous Foot Of The Mountain tour, front of house engineer Sherif El Barbari was happy to use it again. This time he was joined by monitor engineer Kursten Smith using a DiGiCo SD8.
“When the band asked me to do this tour, as far as equipment goes, all I asked for was an SD7,” says El Barbari. “It has never let me down and, with its full redundancy, I have complete confidence that everything will be fine.
“It also allows you to do cool things. I’ve started to get fancy and use a camera feed to the desk, utilizing Macros to achieve my own video mix, remotely switching via MIDI between eight camera signals. Sound engineers have a bad habit of looking at the desk, not at the stage, and so the video screen on the console helps me to look at the stage as much as possible.”
Supplied by Capital Sound, the audio rig includes a Martin Audio W8L Longbow system and Sennheiser microphones. The SD7 has around 47 inputs from the stage, of which nine are for various loops and samples.
“Even though those channels don’t change in level, dynamics of live instruments and vocals do,” El Barbari continues. “I’m using snapshots for each song as a starting point, but I’m still mixing to compensate for changes. I also use relative groups a lot and varying cross-fade times for different channels on different songs.”
He continues, “I’ve actually set up sessions to allow for 128 inputs, we did two shows with a symphony orchestra so it was handy to be prepared for a larger number of inputs. One reason I really like the desk is because you can simply arrange things and tailor your interface – even during the show.”
In terms of effects, El Barbari is using onboard FX for guitars and drums. For vocals he likes to use TC Electronic System 6000 along with a 2290 delay and an Eventide Ultra Harmonizer. All dynamics are onboard, plus gates and compressors as well as dynamic EQ with just two Avalon Vt-737sp vacuum tube preamps for lead singer Morten Harket’s main and spare vocal.
“I’m running Morten’s vocal channel on copper to front of house, because it makes sense to use this head amp rather than run it through the stage rack and inserting the Avalons locally, unnecessarily adding latency, ” says El Barbari. “I’ve always used the MIDI facility of the desk to run any outboard effects and now also to run the video. So I’m growing into using more of the SD7 as I go – some of it because it’s cool and some of it because it really makes sense.
“The SD7 is my favorite tool, no question,” he says. “We used to do long sound checks but, with a good sound team, now we hardly do any at all.”
