Off to Europe again, our first stop this time in Barcelona, Spain to play the Primavera Festival (seen above). The show went well, with a Heritage 3000 and a dv-Dosc rig, but no where near enough subs for the size of the audience. Oh well.

It just so happens that the AES convention is going on right next door to the festival, and it just so happens that we have some time off here in Barcelona, so on the day off, Oliver and I go to the convention. Our first stop was a discussion by d&b on subwoofers, and adjusting the dispersion pattern by facing subs the opposite was and messing with phase and delay. A cool little presentation. They should have had their demonstration at the festival, the stage I mixed at could have definitely made use of the lessons taught.

Next we head for the convention floor to check out all the gear and talk some shop. I stop by the Empirical Labs booth to check out their new eq, the Little-Freq, and I was very impressed. I t could do freq conscious compression, and as a de-esser it was superb, the best I have ever heard. I talk a bit with the owner/designer, who was very cool. Told him how much I like the distressor, I’m sure he hears it alot. Sadly with digital taking over live sound, and the fact that these units are 1K plus, I doubt I’ll be using them soon.

Next mission… check out all the digital live sound desks, first stop, Digico. Having just used and being impressed by their D5 I check out some of there other offerings, some smaller versions, some sort of ugly looking buttons/labeling on the new desk, but seems cool.

Right next door, Digidesin, where I get a great demo of the desk by Placebos FOH engineer, and this thing looks cool. The ability to use TDM plug-ins is a very big plus in my book. It still looks a bit space agey up close, but not as bad as you think looking at pictures, and it all feels fairly solid.

Didn’t bother with Yamaha, or perhaps they didn’t even have a booth, cause if they did I probably would have thanked them for the mac native interfaces, and ask why it’s only for certain desks and not all…

Last, a trip over to Inovason, where I get a good, though grumpy, demo on their SY-80, and this thing is pretty cool to. It comes out in the conversation that I am on the road with Mercury Rev and that we are about to do a run of shows in France, and when he hears about the show at Olympic in Nantes, he asks if I would like them to bring a desk by for me to use that night. Hell ya, I’m game, so he hooks me up.

Out third french show into the tour, and true to their word, inovason brings their SY-80 by. Using the desk for the first time definitely slowed things down a bit, but overall I liked the desk. The eq’s and comps sounded good, it was cool how you could layout the faders in basically any way you liked (though that could also get confusing). I had a couple of things I didn’t like, that may or may not be possible, but the fact that I could only control the eq and especially pan of one channel, and the headphone amp on the desk was weak, and I couldn’t quite get it to solo matrix and groups like I wanted.

Overall a slight thumbs up.

I got the offline editing software to work just fine through Virtual PC on my mac. Speaking of offline editing, everyone I spoke to at AES seemed to have no interest in making a mac native offline editor. Thanks for nothing..

The Olympic in Nantes also had a new PA since I was there last, a Nexo Geo rig, I think the Geo-T, they also had those huge weird looking subs, and those things were absolutely amazing. Only one cabinet a side for a club that fits 800 people, and it was more than enough, especially really good in 30-40hz subsonic range.

We had a festival show in Saint-Beurac the next day which went fine. Sonic Youth played after us, and was doing fine till the power went out, but they played on, destroying the DJ rig.

Next day we head to Reims, France to rest and do some sightseeing.. —>

Another show of note on this tour was our show in Skopje, Macedonia. A bit of a rough/poor looking place on our trip from the airport to the hotel. The area around our hotel seemed to be a very small oasis.

Just one local sound company I think, and they aren’t doing too bad as they bring me a Soundcraft Series V and a Meyer Milo rig. Worked out quite well. The audience was amazing, and we sold the show out at around 2000. Not too bad for a country the band had never been to before.

The meyer rig worked out well. They had one of those fancy Meyer processors with the humidly/temperature adjustments. Amusing and scientific, but not a must have.

Now the locals just need to make some nice multipin snakes for their outboard gear (compared to a selection of all sorts of cables) and maybe we should break it to them gently that those SKB cases don’t really save you any money in the long run…..

Also, note to self: don’t check in your FX rack as luggage on a flight, ship it, or leave it home. Thanks to some kind baggage handlers somewhere, I need to replace the rack ears on my TC-D2, yet again…. ;-(