After a successful couple of years, English Singer, Anne-Marie is touring her debut album, Speak Your Mind in Europe, Australia and New Zeland and Asia with the DiGiCo SD12s consoles supplied by Audiotech UK.
Production values at an Anne-Marie show are clearly a far cry now to what they were just a couple of years ago. According to FOH Engineer, Ben Dexter, it is down to hard work, raw talent, and determination.
“In preparation for this year’s run of support shows, we needed to find a console that would accommodate our ever-increasing channel count while also having a fairly small footprint at FOH,” Dexter explained. “I looked into a few different manufacturers, but kept coming back to DiGiCo, finally settling for two SD12s, sharing an SD Rack. The size, power, flexibility and, of course, the sound of the SD12 with the SD Rack has been great for me.”
Dexter and Monitor Engineer, James Kerr, are both DiGiCo SD12 users. Kerr started working with Anne-Marie in 2016, at Brighton’s Great Escape Festival. For Kerr, the biggest advantage in opting for an SD12 over any other console is its workflow.
“I have been a fan of DiGiCo ever since attending some training back in 2012, and after a few one-off shows with SD12s at the tail-end of last year, I found I was working very quickly with them,” he said. “The dual screen and channel strip functions are invaluable for me. I utilise the Aux to Faders on-screen panel to free up faders, and the Macro buttons are a huge bonus for me; they’re well placed, and having the ability to label and colour code them means you are never guessing. Here, I have a fairly complex talkback section which enables me to talk to anyone on the show, individually or not – including FOH – with the same microphone, at the touch of a Macro.”