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Four D5 Live Consoles on Rockpolitik
Since ‘Pregherò’, his 1962 Italian version of ‘Stand by Me’, Adriano Celentano has been one of Italy’s most popular pop stars, not only for his singing talent, but also his flamboyant, outspoken character. His latest venture was Rockpolitik, a recent mini-series of prime time TV shows screened live nationwide by Italy’s state broadcaster’s RAI 1 channel. As well as being left total freedom of content by RAI, who produced the shows in collaboration with Ballandi Entertainment and Clan Celentano, the singer directed the shows personally and had an impressive amount of AV and lighting hardware installed in the huge ICET Studio hosting the show on the outskirts of Milan.
The audio system (designed by Daniel Tramontani for rental firm Agorà) included no less than four DiGiCo D5 Live consoles, two of which were used to mix the music fed out to the RAI OB trucks, the others to mix the main monitor set-up.
The desks in the playout mixing room (configured by Tramontani in mirror mode) were manned by Maurizio Maggi and Marco Borsatti, neither of whom were newcomers to digital technology. As well as important live projects, Maggi has his own mobile recording facility and brought along part of his set-up to make a multi-track recording of each show for the artist. Undaunted by the scale of the show, he explained: “One of the hardest parts was to ensure viewers at home a sound that maintained the 22-piece house band’s punch, but kept the instruments as separate as possible.” Maggi concentrated on Celentano’s voice, but the two engineers interacted on getting an overall sound that satisfied Rockpolitik’s musical director and bandleader Celso Valli and was different from anything normally heard on a TV show.
Freelance engineer Borsatti works regularly in the Bologna studio owned by Valli (which he also installed and cabled) and was in on Celentano’s last album and single. Although at his first outing with a D5, Borsatti has considerable digital experience and particularly liked the fact that for each channel it’s possible to see everything and keep it under control. He said: “I found the console extremely versatile and really appreciated the possibility of grouping the band’s various instruments into the first eight channels of each layer - for example, drums and percussion on the first, bass and guitars on the second, keyboards on the third, and so on - you can thus keep everything under control, moving through the ‘pages’. On other consoles you have to choose the channel you’re interested in and use a separate section for EQ, compression, etc., but with the D5, you’re able to keep all the functions of each channel right there - which allows manual work to be carried out as if on an analogue desk - extremely intuitively.”
Backstage, the two D5 desks on monitor chores were helmed by Stevan Martinovic and Adriano Brocca. Martinovic is definitely no newcomer to the D5, as he explained, “I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked on the console on an on-going basis over the last two or three years, including world tours by top Italian artists.”
Even for Martinovic, however, Rockpolitik was quite a complicated job as far as monitor work was concerned since, apart from the first show, before which he and Brocca had a good lengthy run-up, for the others there was a very busy rehearsal schedule, and they found the DiGiCo desks of great help. “One fundamental advantage of digital desks is obviously the possibility of recalling the settings you’ve chosen for each song, to fine tune them or make any changes that become necessary as rehearsals progress."
Stevan, who fed his mix to Celentano, Valli and part of the band, using a combination of IEM systems, remarked: “We really exploited the desks - it’s not very common to find such versatility as far as monitoring is concerned on a TV show, and this was greatly facilitated by the D5s, which enabled us to give the entire 22-member band individual stereo monitoring without the need for any pre-mixing.”
Adriano Brocca had worked previously with movie soundtrack icon Ennio Morricone on a D5, and on Rockpolitik handled monitor chores for the house band’s six brass players and three keyboard players, as well as sending feeds to the numerous monitors installed on the set. He explained: “This was the first time I’d made such in-depth use of the desk, and I really appreciated its reliability, versatility and excellent sound. Its architecture left me pleasantly surprised by how I managed to do a great job very quickly – I pushed it hard and tested inputs, output, delay times and much more, and found it exceptional from every point of view. During rehearsals, we set and stored a ‘scene’ for each song, and when we recalled them, continued to work manually on the mix during the show, lowering levels if the musicians played harder, etc. – so the D5 ensured us best of both worlds – its digital technology allowing settings to be recalled exactly as set during rehearsals, with the user-friendly interface enabling the mix to be fine-tuned live – the digital domain with a human touch!”
In picture: Marco Borsatti (left) and Maurizio Maggi at the two D5s used to mix the music fed to the RAI OB van.
13th December 2005
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